A stunning display
The 24-in. display Apple sent over for review purposes is, in a word, stunning. If you like the LED displays Apple has in its laptop line-up now, you're going to swoon when that same brightness, color saturation and razor-sharp text rendering is blown up on a 24-in. screen. Of course, you're paying something of a premium for that big-screen perfection; other 24-in. displays sell in the $500 to $600 range, a lot less than the $899 Apple wants for the Cinema Display. But they aren't LED-backlit, nor are they anywhere as stylish. And since they aren't LED-based, they can't make the environment-friendly claims Apple can.
The 21-pound Cinema Display looks a lot like Apple's 24-in. iMac without the extra "chin" below the screen. Like the iMac, it's adjustable up and down, but doesn't swivel from side to side. The viewing angle is great: 178 degrees along both the vertical and horizontal planes.
The main chassis -- constituting the back and sides of the display -- comes from a single chunk of aluminum, just like the new unibody laptops. The glass panel in front is surrounded by a shiny black bezel, again like the screen used in the new MacBooksandMacBook Pro. And while the measured brightness is down a bit from Apple's other displays -- 330 instead of 400 nits -- the new glass allows for better contrast. The instant-on LED display has a contrast ratio of 1000-to-1, instead of the 700-to-1 ratio its siblings offer. The upshot is a screen with exceptional brightness and contrast, even in a bright office setting with sunlight-drenched windows.
The glossy screen does reflect a bit, but I didn't find that to be a problem. It goes with the territory: glossy screens, while offering reflections in bright settings such as fluorescent office lights, compensate with brighter whites, deeper blacks and saturated colors. I'll take the trade-off.
De facto docking station
Equally welcome is how the high-quality display becomes a de facto docking station for Apple laptop users. Setup is easy. Plug in the display, then plug in the connector cable. The cable splits three ways, offering a MagSafe connector that charges your laptop when you're using the display, a USB connector and the aforementioned Mini Display connector for video.
The introduction of the Mini DisplayPort connection is both good and bad. It's good in that it feeds plenty of video bandwidth from a very small port, so that even the entry-level $1,299 MacBook can drive the new 24-in.LED display at its full 1920 by 1200-pixel resolution. (In fact it can even drive Apple's mammoth 30-in. Cinema Display at 2560-by-1600 pixels.)
But it's bad because right now the only laptops that can connect to the new display are the latest MacBooks, the 15-in. MacBook Pro and the revised MacBook Air. Although there are adapters available to connect the new laptops to older Apple displays -- the adapters cost either $29 or $99, depending on the type of connection you need to make -- there aren't any that could be used to connect older Mac hardware to the new LED display. That means owners of the 17-in. MacBook Pro and Apple's Mac Pro desktop machines are out of luck because those machines don't have Mini DisplayPorts -- yet.
I expect this mis-match to be rectified soon. Keep an eye on next month's MacWorld Expo for updated hardware that includes the new Mini DisplayPort -- maybe even a full revamp of the rest of Apple's older display line. Apple's 20-in. and 30-in. displays haven't yet been updated with either the Mini DisplayPort connector or LED backlighting. I have no way of knowing whether Apple will update its hardware accordingly, as Apple doesn't talk about upcoming products. But it makes sense for the company to do so.
USB connection offers room to grow
The USB connector is particularly useful when connecting a MacBook Air to the display, as the laptop only has one USB port. Since the display has three powered USB ports on the back, it can also serve as a USB hub for peripherals -- and it'll even charge your iPhone or iPod when they're connected.
I used one of the ports on the display to connect to a USB hard drive that I use for backups, and another to connect to the USB SuperDrive that's an optional accessory for the Air. Both came to life as soon as I plugged the Air into the monitor, and Apple's backup software Time Machine immediately began backing up my data just as if I'd hooked up the external drive directly to the laptop.
The LED can either mirror the display on your laptop (at the laptop's native 1280 by 800-pixel resolution) or function as an extended desktop running at the full 1920 by 1200 resolution. If you're using your laptop with the lid closed, the display acts like an external monitor, switching on its built-in iSight Web cam and microphone if you're video chatting, and turning on the three speakers built in to the monitor.
Yes, three speakers. Like the iMac, the display has two downward-firing speakers and a third that pushes sound out the back, reflecting off the support arm back toward the user. The resulting sound is a huge improvement over the MacBook Air's single speaker.
In fact, a lot of LED owners will likely use the display with their laptop closed. Snag an Apple wireless keyboard and mouse and you're ready to get to work as soon as you hook up the display cables. Just use the keyboard or mouse to wirelessly wake the computer from sleep mode and get busy. It worked like a charm for me, much to the delight of one of Computerworld's tech guys, who was considering the display/docking station concept for a corporate bigwig.
The integrated Nvidia 9400M graphics processor in the Air had no problem driving video on the display; playback was smooth, although I did notice that minimizing windows to the Mac OS X dock wasn't quite as fluid as it is on the Air's built-in screen. You'd have to be looking for it to really notice it, though. Apple claims a response time of 14 milliseconds, meaning video and games should generally play fine without looking choppy.
In addition to aesthetics, Apple also touts the display's environmental bona fides. It's mercury-free, arsenic free and avoids the use of PVCs around internal cables and wiring. In addition to being Energy Star compliant for low power use, the LED display got an Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) gold rating for environmental friendliness, as have a number of displays from other manufacturers.
The bottom line
Apple's 24-in. LED backlit Cinema Display offers everything a Mac user would want in an external monitor: A bright and sharp screen with high contrast, vivid colors and crisp text.
For Mac laptop owners on the go, it also doubles as something of a docking station, allowing users to charge their laptops and plug in several peripherals when working at their desks. With a built-in iSight Web cam, microphone and three speakers, it also works well for video chats and audio and video playback.
At $899, Cinema Display is not cheap, and it uses Apple's new Mini DisplayPort for its video connection, meaning an adapter will be needed for all but the latest laptops Apple has released. With those caveats aside, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better looking screen -- both in terms of the display and the aesthetics of its design -- out there. In both form and function, it shines.
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