Apple Cinema 23" HD Flat-Panel Display

Manufacturer:	Apple Computer
Our price:	Too Low To Display

Apple Cinema 23" HD Flat-Panel Display

Average rating: Stars

The pink cast that won't go away

After months of pondering the idea that Macintoshs are somehow better than PC's, last October I splurged over $5,000 on a Macintosh G5 Powermac with two 1.8 MHZ Processors, 2 MB of RAM, an ATI Radeon
Mac Special Edition Graphics Card and one of those then new aluminum 23" Cinema Displays.

After managing to haul the boxes filled with my new equipment up the stairs (they must be made out of heavy aluminum), I set up the system and booted it up. It was the first time I had owned a Mac since 1993 when my employees at Mindware bought me a Pentium 2 for my birthday. I was excited since had heard so much about the superior graphics of the Mac.

Well after getting rid of their one button mouse and putting on a two bottom Microsoft IntelliMouse, I had a good look at the new interface. I noticed something odd. The display had an odd pink cast to it. I talked to my friend Clay by phone and he told me that this is how Macs are supposed to look. I thought, I guess I'll get used to this. If you want to get an idea about the problem, take a look at " Color Consistency Problems with the New Aluminum Apple Cinema Display HD 23" To read a weblog that chronicled this problem, read Cinema Displays.

I never did get used to it. A week later, I found an article on Apple Cinema Displays have faulty LCD panels: Bad Batch in Barrel. When I read this, I immediately called Apple Support. The tech recommended I read the Apple Forum on their Tech Support Site so I did. I read story after story about people who had gotten Apple to swap their pink-eyed monitor for a new one -- only to get another one with similar problems. When I went to computer stores that sold Apples, I always looked at the 23" Cinema Displays and they are always pink.

Here is a post from AppleNova Forum:

Just a quick note for those suggesting color calibration:A good percentage of the 23" apple displays are permanetly pink. This is a well known and documented problem which no amount of calibration will ever remedy.

Granted, there are people that have a slightly pink display that can be fixed by calibration. Yet, this is of no help to those with one of the defective displays.Do a quick google on pink apple display problems and you'll turn up a billion reports. It really is astounding that there hasn't been a recall. I'm not one to scream the sky is falling, but in this case, the product has a widespread, major defect.

I predict a class action lawsuit relatively soon...(authors note: see story in Forbes)

The day before yesterday, I spent an hour trying to adjust the monitor "just one more time." I could not get it right so I went to the forums again. All of the posts that I had made about the pink problem had been deleted. But new ones had proliferated. One person said that he had gotten a new monitor and that it was good. White was white again.

So I called what has always been called the Superior Apple Technical Support. After all, I had paid several hounded for an extended warranty, maybe they might swap my defective screen for a good one, like the fellow on the forum. Well I think that I reached all the way to India on the first call. After going through all sorts of tech support steps read off a cue sheet or screen, I told the guy, "Look, I think I should get a new monitor."

No, you have had the monitor too long. We are going to repair it. So he told me to call CompUSA and schedule to have it repaired. When I called CompUSA, they told me that they no longer serviced Apples and to take it to Century 23 near the Meadow Mall (I live in Las Vegas). So the next day, I packed the monitor in its original packing and took it to the store. They told me "they had heard about this problem before" but that I had better be prepared to have Apple "repair" the monitor several times before they finally replace it.

Now I ask you, why does a rich company like Apple continue to stonewall its customers on something like this. They will not admit that there was a problem. Apparently they bought a large lot of defective panels and they can't afford to take a hit on them. So their customers are paying.

So those of you who are considering switching to Apple -- remember this story. And also you should know that if you are every unhappy with Apple as a vendor, there is no other company to turn to and still continue to use their operating system. And they want to keep it that way.

Not only is my expensive Cinema display a joke, now they decided to switch to Intel processors. So my expensive aluminum tower is now an instant antique!

Apple Cinema 23" HD Flat-Panel Display - Apple Computer

Pinkish cast seems to have been resolved by Apple

Upgraded my Apple 20" to this 23" Cinema HD after I saw the new display in a newly opened store last week and noticed the pinkish haze/colorcast is now gone. What a big difference from the 20" in terms of size and I thought that it would not matter much. I will further calibrate this display with SpyderPro to get the colors spot on. I highly recommend this monitor now that the issue seems to have been resolved. I think this is currently one of the most beautful displays out on the market next to the 30" one and it performs beautifully on both Macs and PCs. I am switching between a PowerMac G5 (ATI 9650) and a PC with an ATI X700 PRO video card via a DVI KVM switch to have the best of both worlds. Another great product from Apple.

Apple Computer - Apple Cinema 23" HD Flat-Panel Display

Apple 23" Cimema Display HD - No Silver lining

In short I returned my 23" Apple Cinema Display and got back the 20" Apple Cinema display I had bought the day before. The 20" was so good, so I reasoned - wow, go get the 23" it will be even better - wrong. The 23" Apple Cinema Display did actually run under Windows XP but the color fidelity was 0/10. It is almost as if the 23" display is built at a lower standard, or that there is no Quality assurance with this product. This was due to 3 things. 1) a pink color cast to all neutral grey/white areas. 2) A noticeable squeeze effect at the edges where the display looked like it an LCD being squashed. In these edge areas the color of white or grey changed to green and was darker. I also noticed a minor shift in hue on many of the grey pixels across the screen from left to right edges. 3) A noticeable blur compared to the 20".

My work station area is a mixed Mac/PC affair to maximize productivity and cross platform work. I already run a first generation polycarbonate style 23" Cinema HD for OSX - 2 years now with no drama. I use the PC in Photoshop and wanted a top quality display for scanning Velvia and manipulating large files of 60Mb or more with quick response. I installed a new silver 20" Apple Cinema display to run under Windows XP SP2 using an ATI Sapphire Radeon 9600XT Atlantis 256Mb graphics card and an ASUS A7V8X mainboard. It is a good card for the 20" and the 23" Apple Cinema Displays. The Asus BIOS had to be set to activate the AGP 8x first. The only fault with this combination was that during a hot-restart, the display would remain off (black) and I had to shut down first, then start. Once the display was in this "apple sleep mode - cannot be woken by XP" I could not tell where the XP launch was at and after pressing the restart switch the BIOS would halt at the error report page (I was guessing, the Cinema display was black) so it required a full power-off - disconnect the apple display from the PC card and then start everything again. Otherwise the results were 5 star for the 20" with excellent color accuracy and evenness, brightness and sharpness. I am very experienced with color accuracy in Photoshop and usually have a neutral desktop background so as not to bias any colors which appear on screen around the Photoshop scans I am working on. I found under windows XP that the Adobe gamma panel was not as good as the ATI color panel (right click desktop/properties/settings/advanced/color) where I could make more precise corrections to the lower/mid/upper ranges of the gamma curve by eye. So far the 20" Apple Cinema display was fantastic and I was again marveling at how well Apple engineers can build or subcontract others to built their gear. Time to rush back to the store and get the BIG brother. Wrong - trouble came to town. See 1/2/3 above. I thought the problem was the Ati 9600XT card - so I switched over the display to run as a second monitor on my Mac Ati9000. So now I had the two 23" displays running side by side, one brand new and silver and the other two years old with 60 hours a week under the hood - that's a lot of hours. Well it was then I knew that the NEW 23" Apple Cinema Display was going straight back to the store. It seems obvious that the display was being squashed at the edges thereby changing the colors in a kind of Newton Ring effect you get with a cheap digital watch.

So I am back using the 20" Apple Cinema Display under Windows XP and all is well - 10/10. This is a perfect way to make Windows XP feel like a friend, even when running right next to my old 23" HD in OSX 10.3. By the way the Ati 9600XT 256Mb is very fast in 2D using Photoshop CS. My warning to buyers of the 23" Apple Cinema Display is that you should be very careful. Don't be fooled by the default blue desktop and fancy visuals they run in the retail environment. Check the product in store in a cool and calm way. Open an Application that uses white/grey like Safari and go to google.com. Set the screen to full width, then check out the fidelity of the grey/white at the edges. Interestingly when I reported this problem to the store they did not even question the fault, or open the box, the guy looked a bit sheepish - mumbled some thing which was hard to hear. It sounded like "yeah we have had this problem before".

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