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The 23in. Apple HD Cinema Display includes two USB ports on the rear and a brightness button that opens up the onscreen monitor control panel.

Introduced at MacWorld Tokyo early this year as the HD follow-up to the slightly smaller Cinema Display, Apple's HD Cinema Display is an essential product for any After Effects, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Maya or (your graphics app here) user. The $3,499 price tag may raise a few eyebrows, but consider the number of hours you spend sweating the details of a texture map, HD frame, roto job, or Photoshop retouching assignment. The original Cinema Display was certainly a great monitor at 1600×1200 pixels, but even the supersized 1920×1200 pixels of the HD Cinema Display is not really that large when faced with the dimensions of an 8.5"×11" image at 200dpi or the output of a 5Mpixel digital camera. Perhaps this will make it clear: the better the monitor, the more precise your work will be. I'll take 3,000 pixels when it's available.

The 23in. HD Cinema Display is a thin film transistor (TFT) active-matrix liquid crystal display with a contrast ratio of 350:1 and brightness of 200cd/m². In addition to the specs, LCDs just look a lot sharper edge-to-edge than CRTs, because as fully digital devices they display pixels rather than excite phosphors in a matrix by projecting electrons.

There are over 2.3 million pixels in the Apple HD Cinema Display — more than enough to allow side-by-side viewing of two 8.5"×11" documents in Photoshop with enough room left over for the palettes and toolbar. I did find one dead pixel, but this is almost impossible to see in normal use. Flat panels have come a long way in the last five years, and the Apple HD display has very even edge-to-edge brightness within a viewing angle of 160 degrees. Sitting in a room of CRTs, it's by far the brightest display in the group.

You will need a brawny graphics card to drive the HD Display: Apple recommends the Nvidia GeForce2 MX, GeForce 3, GeForce 4 MX, or GeForce4 Ti. The HD Cinema Display uses Apple's proprietary Digital Video Interface (DVI) connector, which means that it works only with the G4 or the latest PowerBooks. Adapters, however, are available for older Macs and cards (see the “Connections” sidebar).

Out of the box at 30lbs., the HD Cinema Display is light as a feather compared with the 21in. ViewSonic dinosaur I had to move to make room for the Apple display. The single ADC cable carries the video signal, power for the monitor, and a USB signal, making for an uncluttered space under my desk and a one-plug operation to get the screen fired up. This is how digital graphics is supposed to work.

Apple warrants the HD Cinema Display against defects in materials and workmanship for one year from the date of purchase.

A surface (capacitance) power switch is on the lower-right frame of the monitor and a single brightness switch is on the left. All the usual color, contrast, and brightness controls that you are used to adjusting from the front of your CRT have been replaced by software controls. The brightness button opens the control panels (in OS 9.2), allowing access to the brightness, gamma, and whitepoint. The Monitor Calibration Assistant in OS 9.2 helps you save a custom monitor profile or select among any of the dozens of presets.

I really appreciated the two USB ports on the back of the monitor. My printer and keyboard used up the available ports on my dual 800MHz G4, and the additional two ports on the back of the monitor allow me to plug in a Wacom tablet and a Primatte software dongle where they are easily within reach.

This brings up another advantage: workspace ergonomics. Flat-screen technology may put a dent in sales at Pearle Vision as millions of computer users begin to work at a more reasonable distance from the screen. Most digital studios I've seen (including my own) have struggled with the problem of CRTs that are so deep that the screen hovers over the keyboard, inches from the user. The Apple monitor, despite the fact that it occupies a healthy chunk of my field of view, is still at a comfortable distance sitting at the back of my 34in.-deep desk.

There really is no contest when it comes to comparing the sharpness and color fidelity of a modern flat screen with that of a moderately priced CRT. This was not always the case, but the most recent slew of high-end LCD displays give, in my opinion, far superior images for compositing and image manipulation.

You don't have to be a Pinnacle CineWave HD owner to benefit from the extra screen real estate. If you want to see your 24p HDcam footage at 100% and full-screen, the Apple HD Cinema display is the one to use. However, the screen is not truly an HD monitor for video: First, you will not be able to play 24p HD movies on your Mac — even with a disc array able to play 125MBps. That's because the Apple Cinema Display does not support 24fps. You will need to add 3:2 pulldown to enable realtime playback. You can bake pulldown into your render in After Effects or some other software, but you'll still need a super-fast HD disk array and SCSI accelerator card to achieve smooth playback.

But I have a CineWave card, you say. Can this be used to play back HD sequences at full res on the Apple display? The answer is still no. The CineWave, Digital Voodoo, and Kona cards all have HD SDI output that is not compatible with DVI or the Apple Display Connector (ADC). This limitation, by the way, is the same for all LCD flat panels that display 1920×1200 and use a DVI or ADC connector. There is a workaround, however (see the sidebar on display conversion on Videosystems.com).

Pixel latency, which shows up as ghosting, can be a problem for LCD screens. A good test of screen refresh is a DVD with high-contrast, fast-moving action. The DVD player in my G4 cannot display at 1920×1200 pixels, but the image filled about two thirds of the screen. Ghosting on even the fastest camera moves was barely visible and unlikely to be an issue when working with After Effects or Photoshop. Ghosting is rapidly becoming a non-issue for LCD panels as refresh rates continue to improve.

This is an excellent monitor for high-end graphics and, with Apple's high-profile marketing, will probably own this market for some time. It's the rare example of an Apple product that Mac and PC users can enjoy with equal ease. If you are editing images for HD, I don't see how you cannot buy this monitor. Masks, detailed textures, and other effects that depend on fine edges cannot be evaluated fully at 1600×1024.

Not being able to use the HD Cinema Display as a true video monitor in an HD pipeline is not a trivial problem — and one that will not be solved by any of the manufacturers at the current price point. This is not an Apple issue; it's just the nature of the LCD glass and electronics supplied by manufacturers like Philips. Computer monitors and video monitors are very different technologies.

That issue aside, this is one of the best products Apple has developed lately. Use it and you won't be able to go back to any other monitor.

S.D. Katz is a New York-based writer/director and the author of the best-selling books Shot by Shot and Cinematic Motion. He's currently busy at work on his latest screenplay.

Company: Apple Computer
Cupertino, Calif.
(408) 996-1010
www.apple.com
Product: HD Cinema Screen
Assets: Large pixel count (1920×1200) allows HD images to be displayed at full size; small footprint, and lightweight at 30lbs.; two USB ports on the back of the monitor; virtually no ghosting.
Demographic: After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, etc. artists working with HD-resolution images.
Price: $3,499

Making the Right Connections

IT'S LIKE THE SHARKS AND THE JETS. On the one side you have the display cards with VGA, DVI, or ADC connectors; on the other side you have CRTs and flat-panel monitors. Each has its own connector. Let's start on the graphics card side. There are three basic standards: VGA is the old analog connection, DVI is the new “digital standard,” and ADC is Apple's take on a how a digital connector should work.

DVI: There are several flavors of this connector thanks to the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG), an open industry group that includes Intel, Compaq, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, IBM, NEC, and Silicon Image. The seven digital connections are DVI-D, DVI-I, DVI-A, DFP, P&D, OpenLDI, and ADC.

The Apple Display Connector (ADC) is recognizable because the metal shield enclosing the plug or pin array is rounded on the ends. Unlike the DDWG's DVI connectors for PCs, Apple includes power and a USB connection in a single cable.

There are many third-party suppliers of cables that will convert VGA to ADC, DVI to ADC, and ADC to DVI. This means that some older PCI Macs and PCs can use the Cinema Displays — provided the graphic card can handle the resolution.
— SK

As mentioned, the Apple HD Cinema Display (as well as all other TFT displays) cannot display the range of frame rates that are necessary to display video (23.976fps to 60 fields). The EDP100 (Ecinema Display Processor) from Ecinema Systems (www.ecinemasys.com) was developed to convert HD SDI signals to the DVI signal the TFT displays require. This is done by de-interlacing the source video and adding (variable) 3:2 pulldown on the fly. EDP also provides access to the CLUT of the signal through a program that lets engineers match the "look" of the monitor to that of a specific profile such as a projector or HD camera. The 10-bit signal is preserved internally and converts to 8-bit on output (TFTs are RGB 8 bits per pixel). The EDP100 will also support vectorscope and waveform and camera reticule overlays.

While the EDP100 was designed with the HD Cinema Display in mind, it will also be of value to a wide range of production applications, such as digital I/O boards, live monitoring of HD cameras in the field, graphics systems with I/O capability, and DLP and D-ILA projectors with DVI inputs. The product is expected to ship in early 2003.

Seeing Red - and Green and Blue

When you change the colorimetry on an LCD monitor, what you are actually changing is the Look Up Table used by the graphics card. In other words, you alter the signal sent to the LCD—not the LCD itself. Within the control panel (invoked by the brightness switch on the Apple HD Display), you will find the Monitor Calibration Assistant, where you can set a custom calibration (called a profile) or access one of dozens of presets.

Like CRTs, LCD screens fade over time. This is mainly due to the darkening of the flourescent backlights that illuminate the TFT structure. Actual experience with this is scant, because LCDs are relatively new and the latest models are substantially better than flat-screen displays that are only two years old. But even my five-year-old LCD panels have held up better than my CRT monitors as far as color shifts are concerned.

To comment on this article, email the Video Systems editorial staff at vsfeedback@primediabusiness.com.