17" LCD Studio Display

[hazmat]

Sorry to be posting about this in here as well as having already in the hardware forum, but this is really bothering me and I wanted more exposure.

I got a few days ago the 17" Studio Display for my G4 867 with GeForce2 MX. I have calibrated it as well as I could, but still find some issues that I hope are simply because I'm missing something, since I feel that a $1000 monitor should be better.

I understand that the red tinge to characters is fairly normal due to the sub-pixelization, so I won't realy talk about that. But the biggest issue here is that the fonts in the menu bar, Finder, Dock menus, etc., are kind of distorted unless I set font smoothing to Standard. Setting it to Medium, which it says is best for flat panels, actually chops off some letters. Looks horrible. Here is a screenshot of it in Medium mode. Notice how the h's get cut off. And you can see the red tinge to the I, and is more apparent in some l's.

So is this normal or is something not right?

Thanks.

[fryke]

I can't seem to download the screenshot right now. But basically, there are some people whose eyes just don't appreciate this wonderful technology. Switch to normal?

[hazmat]

What wonderful technology, to chop off letters?

[Geminis]

To be honest, I never noticed it until this post. In other words, cannot really tell if the monitor sucks, or if it's in the system software, if I look at my photographics, it's unbelievable sharp and makes me very satisfied....

make a test with photoshop and make the same graphic, see if it's the same...

[xaqintosh]

I think its the antialiasing, set it lower and it should be fine.

[hazmat]

Well I stopped by the Apple store on the way home from work to check out the displays there. They all do it with any level of font smoothing set. All LCDs. Interestingly enough, they were all set to Standard. I talked to a guy at the Genius Bar about it, and we played with his iBook there and he saw it all and thinks maybe it's the font in the menu bar and such. I want to keep font smoothing set, since it really does make the text for the icons in the toolbars much sharper. I'll just deal, but I think this is really bad. I'm going to file a bug report with Apple.

So overall, I really do like this display. Awesome contrast and images and a lot of text look so sharp. I hope Apple fixes this.

Oh, and Geminis: sorry. I tend to have this effect on people. I notice real little details and tend to piss people off, pointing out defects in things that they never would have noticed.

[Geminis]

haha hazmat, you didn't piss me off. Stay Sharp! ;-)

Keep us informed about your bug report...

[fryke]

Well, now that I've seen your screenshot, I must say that this is normal.

If you look closely, there are some instances of 'h' that get less cut, somehow. Basically, it's what you get with AntiAliasing. It's a _hack_: Rather than having 300dpi displays, we have 72 or 96 or 100dpi displays (or something inbetween), and the subpixel rendering tries to improve on it. But they do have the RGB arrangement. You cannot place a reddish shade at the place where green is. So what Apple does is to calculate the best shading. It looks good if your distance to the monitor is right, but if you look closely, it's of course just plain wrong. :P But that's not a bug per se.

You can say that the chosen font (Lucida) might not be the best for the purpose, but there are better AND worse.