Product Review: Page (1) of 2 - 12/21/04

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Apple 30-Inch Cinema HD Display Sometimes more is more ... By Dave Nagel Dear Santa: I'd like to speak seriously with you for a few moments, so let's dispense with the pleasantries and get straight to the point. California law requires you to roll over year-end merit points and apply them to the holder's Naughty/Nice account (1225K) for subsequent years. If you will examine your ledgers from 1968 to the present, you will notice that I have approximately 500 such accumulated points.* Taking into account amortization over 36 years, that translates roughly to the cost of an Apple 30-inch Cinema HD Display. Shall I expect delivery this Christmas? Please advise. From, David N.

Well, a boy can wish, can't he?

And surely Apple's 30-inch Cinema HD Display is something worth wishing for. The top of the line LCD display from Apple is, simply put, the most gorgeous display I've ever seen. It's sheer size dwarfs just about anything that could reasonably be called a computer monitor, but more than this--much more than this--it's everything you could hope for in terms of a monitor designed for professionals in the visual arts: color accuracy and consistency, performance and resolution.


Size, resolution, design
We'll begin with the 30-inch Cinema HD Display's most obvious virtues: size and resolution. This display offers a widescreen configuration measuring approximately 30 inches diagonally, with an optimal resolution of 2,560 x 1,600. Compare that with the 1,920 x 1,200 resolution of the 23-inch Cinema HD Display and the 1,680 x 1,050 resolution of the 20-inch Cinema Display.


What does this mean in terms of everyday use? It means you have a whole lot of room to play around with.



If you're in print, for example, you have room to display an entire tabloid spread at 100 percent magnification, with an awful lot of room left over for palettes and anything else you'd care to have open. (The image below shows a tabloid spread--two pages measuring 11" x 17" each--in Adobe InDesign.)



If you're in video, compositing, motion graphics or animation, it means you can display an entire 1,920 x 1,080 HD image with room to spare for timelines, palettes and miscellaneous windows. (The image below shows an image 1,920 x 1,080 in Apple's Motion.)



* Based on EBITDA.
Or, just for the heck of it, six windows at a DV resolution of 720 x 480, as seen below in Adobe Photoshop, again with plenty of room to spare.



And if you're in audio, how about being able to view 66 tracks in Logic Pro 7's Arrange window with tracks collapsed or 16 to 18 tracks with tracks expanded, track automation visible and global tracks open? Oh yeah, and you still have room for the Global Mixer, Score, Event and Transpose windows, plus any other window you'd care to have open.



Ridiculous, isn't it?

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