could apple have single-handedly disrupted an entire industry with the
pro-display xdr cause here's the thing to mere mortals like you or me five
thousand dollars for a monitor might seem like madness
but compared to the professional-grade displays that apple has directly in
their sites here it's a steal of a deal
so let's experience it together and see for
ourselves but first we need to experience this
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starting on the outside the pro display xdr's box is robustly built and like its
partner in crime the mac pro has a fabric carrying handle that makes the
whole thing feel decidedly sturdy and premium and that's a good thing because at five
thousand dollars this thing ain't cheap once you open it up you're greeted by a
power cable a Thunderbolt cable and a little note saying that you should be
thankful that you even got that i'm just kidding about the last bit but it is
true apple stopped their guns in spite of the criticism they faced and included
no mounting hardware whatsoever in the box let's look at the sold separately
mounting hardware the 200 vase amount adapter simply slots into place twist
the lock clockwise to secure it and then you mount it like any normal vasa
display done i can actually see why apple wanted to do their own mount for
this because it is seriously easy to use and it's rock solid if you want to roll
your own monitor ARM we've actually got affiliate links for a couple of
recommended ones down below the bottom line here is that while it annoys me
that apple doesn't include anything i can also respect that they didn't want
to throw in pricey accessories that won't be used and given that they are
going up against displays that cost tens of thousands of dollars another 300
bucks isn't going to be a difference maker for a pro who wants a top-tier
display with great ergonomics then there's also the pro stand option for a
thousand dollars and the cold hard truth here is that this is a product for
sucker wannabes who buy pro things to flex on their buddies i mean most of the
professionals i know are not into less functionality for more money and while
apple's claims of weightless adjustment and stability
basically hold up i suspect that most real-world deployments of this display
are going to use the vase adapter and a proper monitor ARM which is probably why
apple opted to make this stand available separately at a luxury item price rather
than just put it in the box but let's take a closer look at it
anyway since i'm stuck with one now adjustments can be made with a single
finger if you're a designer who's sick of moving around your imac to show your
work to curious observers by the way that design lloyd's working on is
available on lttstore.com but unfortunately there are a few problems
with this first there's no horizontal adjustment available whatsoever so
tilting the display left or right is going to require you to move the entire
stand which can be particularly annoying with a multi-monitor setup especially if
you need to angle one of them second the height adjust is not on a
slider it's on a lever instead and this might seem like a non-issue but as you
adjust the display up and down you're also moving it back and forth which
means you might need to fiddle with how it sits on your desk it's just not that
elegant now some people here didn't like the amount of play in the pivot
mechanism but i didn't mind it you never know when your desk is going to be
not quite level and i really appreciated the simple latch mechanism smooth
rotation of the display and the satisfying click when it goes into place
so that's all fine and good but what's it like to actually use
on paper out of this world it's factory
calibrated and apple is one manufacturer i actually trust to do a bang-up job of
this it's got 576 local dimming zones and it's got
reference modes for HDR print
digital cinema and more it boasts incredibly deep blacks with advertised
sustained brightness of 000 nits and peak brightness of 1600 nits and in
person honestly it just kind of looks stunning
the only thing that i felt i needed to change out of the box was true tones
this is an apple feature that changes the on-screen colors according to
ambient light and i i get having it supported
and thankfully it is disabled in any of the reference profiles but i find it
obnoxious enough on a phone and even for casual computer use i would prefer not
to have the distraction fortunately it's easy enough to turn
that off and change any reference modes that you want via the display applet in
system preferences but that is going to be a problem
the only way to control this monitor is through apple's system preferences
there are no buttons or osd whatsoever
so unlike the apple cinema displays of yesteryear
on Windows your mileage with this bad boy will vary considerably
now a mac running bootcamp does allow you to control the display with all the
features you'd expect as in macOS but
that little widget is not available for pc scrubs like us what's more the pro
display xdr's Thunderbolt link makes use of apple's custom timing controller that
utilizes two simultaneous DisplayPort links on a single type-c cable that's
how they're achieving that astonishing 6k resolution so just like with lg's
ultrafine 5k yeah you might be able to
get it to display a picture with a Thunderbolt equipped pc by jumping
through some hoops but good luck running full res
using any of the selling points like all the pre-calibrated mode switching and
i mean even adjusting the backlight so what that means for a pc shop like us is
that right out of the gate even though they could have made it work apple has
eliminated the option of upgrading all of our editing workstations to pro
display xdrs so then make sure you guys get
subscribed because we've actually worked out a deal to drop in on a local
production studio with mac workstations to see what they think of it for today
though we do have editors of our own and we do have a mac pro so let's see what
they think so as soon as i opened final cut and it
loaded all the HDR stuff i was like i'll never be satisfied with
anything else ever again because this is the first time that i've
seen like real HDR uh on any system the Windows
implementation of it is total crap um so i feel jealous
on this monitor i did not notice any bad fringing around stuff it looked great
the only thing that really does annoy me about it is off-axis
on the darker colors it does change brightness quite a lot but overall it's
really nice no i don't think the color accuracy was
sacrificed to get the HDR working i mean it's they built it for HDR if Linus
media group had to start doing HDR
i mean i guess we already have this monitor so we might as well use it
but i just i really don't want to have to use macintosh i don't know the system
very well anymore i don't wanna so there are a couple of things to note
that we didn't originally plan for in this script it doesn't really like to
run on a pc the other side of the coin is in macOS it's
pretty much the only way to get HDR on your machine
now there are external boxes aja makes
one but for whatever reason apple's got it locked down and
that's no good i've seen a couple of pictures showing that
compared to the higher end displays it's really bad for like halos and rings
around bright objects but that's only really how it looks on camera to my eye
and to taran's eye and to most other people it's kind of difficult to notice in the
HDR proofing mode honestly i can see it being a problem in
like pin light types of situations that being said the amount of bloom is
very low objectively there are some problems with
the pro display xdr first and foremost is uniformity while it's reasonable most
of the time brightness does taper off pretty noticeably around the edges
giving it kind of an artificial vignette effect that's especially visible with
solid colors more disappointingly on a 25 gray tone
the panel displays a worrying amount of texture on what should just be a solid
color and that's without the fancy glare reduction coating we opted to leave that
off so large vertical bars mean that in spite of the panel's deep blacks it'll
definitely be a little bit more difficult for artists and colorists to do their jobs on darker images
interestingly this test also shows a pretty big variation in viewing angle on
these gray tones in spite of apple's claims of super wide viewing angle
i mean with that said this 25 gray is a
worst case scenario for the display and most of the time these things aren't
noticeable but it is there
thankfully as brightness drops all of these effects become less visible and
the built-in reference modes all dim the screen accordingly anyway and they do a
lot more from what we can tell the reference modes do a damn fine job of
maintaining color accuracy it's worth mentioning that getting accurate results
out of this thing with a colorimeter or a spectrophotometer is a bit of a chore
right now but from what we've been able to glean with the tools we have it's
safe to say that it's as accurate as they say it is with delta ease reliably
below one in the reference modes now you do lose access to brightness controls
while running in these modes and the pro display xdr's standard modes are
definitely going to be better for content consumption even if they
sacrifice some balls to the wall's accuracy but guys when you flip this
thing into i'm creating now ladies and gentlemen look at me i'm an artist
mode you can expect an accurate pro level
experience so the pro display xtr seems like it lives up to its promises
and i mean when the competition's price tag has five digits a four digit one
like this looks pretty darn good but
apple also isn't alone here trying to disrupt that industry ASUS's pro art
pa-32ucx costs a thousand dollars less and not only comes with a stand to make
that 1200 to 2 000 less but it has adobe
RGB support instead of apple's p3d50 for print work and it has double the number
of local dimming zones thanks to its mini led backlight it's only really
missing the pro display xdr's impressive peak brightness and 6k resolution
so let us know in the comments below if you want us to get ASUS to send one of those over so we can compare this
against the pc world's pro display xdr
for today all that's left to say though is
it's a flawed gem but the flaws are pretty minor and it's
definitely still a gem so good job apple this product makes
professional grade HDR mastering more accessible to small and mid-sized
studios everywhere and that's a great thing well
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freshbooks.com forward slash tech tips we're going to have that linked below
thanks for watching if you guys are looking for something else to check out maybe flip on our mac vs pc editing
face-off between i justine and our very own taryn van heemert i'll see you guys
over there