REVISED below with new information about how the monitor and OS distinguishes between regular content, and displays that at 500 nits like an iMac, and HDR content, that it displays at the higher 1000 nits, and mixes the two on the same screen.
I'd be interested in hearing the reactions of the experts on this forum to the early reports on the Apple Pro Display XDR, recognizing that at the moment we only have press reports to go on. The thread on the Mac Pro didn't cover that, presumably because most of you are already running large professional displays.
I'd be interested in the additional size and real estate of the new display, and appreciate the additional sharpness of the retina displays for other functions, like reading text. It would be hard to go back to a standard monitor like an NEC for reading the web and word docs after enjoying a Retina display. Even when including the outrageous price of the stand, it appears that the total price of the Pro Display XDR is competitively priced when compared against similar professional displays.
Apple has corrected two complaints about their displays. The first concerns color accuracy, and this monitor is reported to have a very wide color gamut and precise color accuracy. The reviews of those who saw it next to a top of the line Eizo thought it was better, and favorably compared to the Sony professional monitor, which costs four times more. The second complaint about Apple monitors is the shiny glass surface, and apparently they have fixed that, either with the standard coating on the new monitor or the laser etched option, done directly on the glass, which is reported to cut reflections while not affecting sharpness or contrast.
That means that the new Apple Pro Display XDR, with the etched glass option, is a substantial improvement over the iMac Pro or standard iMacs with regards to the shiny reflective glass surface.
It is also probably superior to many other expensive monitors, that instead apply a frosted or non-glare coating to the surface that smears and obscures sharpness. We have all experienced that downside of "non-glare" monitors. In the past, we had to choose between a non-glare coating that obscures detail, or an iMac high gloss Retina display, with great detail but with glare. Based on the early reports, the new Apple display gives us the best of both worlds -- finally a non-glare etched surface that does not degrade detail or contrast, at least based on current reports.
Any comments on the above would be most welcomed and appreciated.
There are two remaining questions:
(1) The claim to fame for this monitor is the extra brightness and very high contrast ratio for HDR. It is twice as bright as an iMac, and so bright it only accomplishes that when the ambient room temperature and the monitor is below 77°. (Apple included the cheese grater heat sink on the rear for that reason.)
Is this useful for photography? Early test shots of the monitor when viewing photographs make that precise point, and demonstrate how the monitor shows HDR content. I'm aware that paper output can't show this range, but the question is whether such a monitor will help show the full range of HDR -- so a photographer then knows what is actually in the image -- and then knows how it will print, or what is missing in a print.
This feature is definitely useful for video, depending on the type of video shot by a photographer. Many of us are shooting video, including from separate video units.
However, one review, on the No Film School web site, argued that a monitor this bright, if looked at all day long, would damage eyesight. (Although film editors use monitors costing $30,000 and over are already doing that, and not going blind.)
REVISED: The answer on whether the monitor will damage eyesight is how the monitor actually works, which is a bit remarkable. The monitor will show regular content at 500 nits (such as web surfing, word docs and email) and only shows HDR content at the highest brightness. Remarkably, it will also mix and match, and distinguish between text and toolbars, at 500, while showing video content at 1000 or greater, and do so in the same window view in the same application such as Final Cut Pro. Whether it will do that with still or static photographic HDR content is not clear; or whether the feature to mix and match the brightness works only within Final Cut Pro; or what triggers the monitor to show the part of the application in HDR that has that content, while the rest of the screen shows text and tools at the standard 500 nits of an iMac.
See this link from FinalBug.net:
https://www.finalbug.net/videos-learn-fcpx-davinci-workflow/examplethree/videos/the-apple-pro-display-xdr-is-underrated?from=listing(2) The other issue is that as the resolution of a large monitors goes up, the text becomes so tiny as to be nearly unreadable. Apple solved that on the Retina display using proprietary technology, that enlarges only the text, fonts and icons, according to a review by Anand Lal Shimpi from 2013, that I quote below.
Based on the link above, from FinalBug.net, it appears that Apple has fully applied their proprietary technology to the new 6K display. (It will be useless and unreadable it they don't.) For those who hate Apple products, it would be interesting to compare the Apple iMac at 5k or the new Apple 6k display -- with readable text using the Apple algorithms -- with huge monitors at high resolutions run on Windows without the use of similar technology.
That raises another question, namely whether the Apple algorithms will be applied to to a
non-Apple external display hooked up to the new Mac Pro? The Mac OS could identify the display easily enough, and only apply the proprietary technology for fonts to the Display Pro XDR. That would be the typical Apple approach -- apply their own technology only to their own products.
That was confirmed back in 2013, when Anand Lal Shimpi reported that this proprietary Apple technology did
not work if you plugged an external monitor into an iMac or the trashcan Mac Pro -- it only worked on the internal retina display of an iMac or MacBook. Some subsequent reviews of non-Apple large resolution displays in this forum, when hooked up to the older Apple Mac Pro, or to a Macbook with a Retina display, reported the same problem.
But the review quoted below is now almost six years old, so some of you might be able to report on how 4K and 5K external displays, from other manufacturers, work when running from an iMac or the current trash can Mac Pro. The problem might have already been fixed ?? Apple has been selling non-Apple 4K displays on their web site. How do those work when plugged into the older Mac Pro or a current Macbook?
Anand Lal Shimpi on this point in 2013, note his report on non-Apple external displays:
>>"Moving to Sharp’s 32” 4K PN-K321 brought back memories of my 30” days. The display is absolutely huge. OS X (and Windows 8.1) running at 3840 x 2160 is incredible, but I find that text, menus and UI elements can be too small. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be and 3840 x 2160 on a 32” panel is just past the borderline of comfortable for me. For editing photos and videos it’s great, but for everything else the ~30% increase in pixel density was just too much."
>> "Apple actually created a solution to this problem with the MacBook Pro’s Retina Display. On a 13 or 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display Apple renders the screen at full panel resolution (e.g. 2880 x 1800), but renders things like text, menus and UI elements at 4x their normal resolution (2x in each dimension). In supported apps, photos and videos are rendered at a 1:1 ratio with pixels on screen. The combination of the two results in a display that’s both incredibly high res and usable. In the case of the 15-inch MacBook Pro, you get the screen real estate (and corresponding text/widget size) of a 1440 x 900 panel, with the exception of any photo/video/other-special content that can treat the display like a full 2880 x 1800 panel."
>> "For those users who still need more screen real estate and don’t mind trading off UI element size, Apple offers scaling modes that render the screen at an even higher resolution and then scale it down to fit the 2880 x 1800 panel. For example you can select a 1920 x 1200 equivalency mode, which gets rendered at 3840 x 2400 with text/menus/UI elements at 4x res and then scaled down to 2880 x 1800. Apple even wrote their own scaling and filtering algorithms to ensure a consistent user experience regardless of what GPU was active at the time (Intel and NVIDIA scaling/filtering algorithms apparently produce slightly different quality output)."
>> "I was fully expecting all of this to be available on the Mac Pro when connected to a 32” 4K display. By default, there’s only a single supported scaled resolution: 2560 x 1440. Unfortunately it
doesn’t look like Apple is running the same supersampling routines when you pick this resolution, instead you get a 2560 x 1440 desktop scaled up to 3840 x 2160 (rather than a 5120 x 2880 screen scaled down). The result is a bit of a blurry mess."
