I rang around the local mac stores today and finally found a store that had both the glossy and the matte in 17" in stock on demo. I rang them up and asked if I could come down and do a serious comparison over a couple of hours in a darkened environment. They were kind enough to accomodate - on one proviso - that I bought one or the other there and then.
I went down there with my Spyder Pro 2, a couple of test discs [Digital Video Essentials, Monster Video calibrate] and with a color spectro photometer that I use on a daily basis for calibrating plasma displays in my other job [insert plug -
www.cableman.com.au]
I will qualify my findings by saying that I hold an ISF certification from the Imaging Science Foundation and a THX Level II Theatre Technician certifcation - so I have a pretty good grasp of color management, calibration and displays - its grounded in Home theatre - but the principles are the same.
Anyway....my findings....
First things first.. thanks to the guys at the store for giving me the time and space to do this comparison - they kindly set me up in a back room where i could work at my liesure and control the light. [Amazing service! - and it worked as you will see below]
I calibrated both devices with the Spyder Pro 2 in a dark room [the gloss and matte] and generated a profile for each of them. I then calibrated the 30" Cinema display in the room as a reference point - I set them all up side by side.
A quick note.. out of the box the matte was much closer than glossy and looking at the graphs shows less of a correction factor. The glosse took some fiddling to calibrate due to its reflective surface. I had to turn off the work light as it was interfering with spectrophotometer readings. I put a question mark up on how the glood reflects stray light back into the Spyder when calibrating - its just an unknown factor....
Then I ran the DVE disc and checked it with the color spectrophotometer. This was interesting as it [the spectrophotometer] cant generate a profile as its designed to be used for calibrating plasma displays and projectors. However its more accurate [it costs about 10 grand] than the small Spyder and is excellent for checking how good a job the spyder generated profile is doing. In other words it can measure how good a job of producing accurate color the monitor is doing - but it cant do anything about it. Its also excellent for hunting down and revealing color errors - usually in the green channel which is by far the most obnoxious....
Bottom line is.. the Spyder generated profile does a pretty dam good job of getting the video card and LCD to generate accurate color - its not 100% perfect but its dam close and close enough for all but the most critical color work. Note: The 30" Cinema display shows a more even greyscale with less color shift when grayscale tracking [virtually none that is measureable] edge to edge - the differnce between the greayscale tracking of the cinema display is marginal - I couldnt see it with my eye - but the machine can see it. The laptop screens show slight errors [in the red channel] at certain points on the screen [again.. I cant see it with my eye, but it is there]- meaning their uniformity and tracking is not quite as good as the cinema display - nothing to be concerned about and MUCH better than most laptop screens I have ever bothered to test. Its actually a lot better than I expected period.
Anyway I digress. Point is I wanted to get them producing as accurate a color as possible so I could compare them - and bottom line I got them all dam close to perfect. Meaning they are for all intents and purposes IDENTICAL in their ability to reproduce accurate color. They both also do a fine job of grayscale tracking. The gloss screen takes a bit more fiddling and is less acruate out of the box - but once calibrated does just as good a job as the matte. The out of the box comment is actually a bit irrelivent as I only had one there to try - another may have produced a different result....
To end the story.. I had agreed with the store to purchase one or the other. So I purchased the Matte - purely because I found the reflections on the glossy screen to interfere with what I was trying to do when calibrating - which most likely means it would cause me issues in the field.
There was another reason for choosing matte however...
Totally unplanned...I also purchased a 30" cinema display.... it turned out to be an expensive visit! My Visa is smokin! Its display is matte so matches nicely with the matte notebook.
This will be my last post here for a while... Im about to shut down the Dell and fire up the Mac and learn to use a whole new O/S.
I hope this might help others who are unsure of which to purchase - and for the sake of clarity - it doesnt matter. Buy the one you prefer the look of.
***Update***
Edit - I returned the Mac Book Pro for a full refund - I was NOT happy with its speed running CS2. I purchased a Dell Precision M90 workstation laptop instead.