apple news/media reports
03/24/2006, 9:50pm, EST
Friday, March 24th
Apple wins battle of 30-inch displays
Apple's 30-inch Cinema Display wins by a small margin over Dell 30-inch UltraSharp 3007WFP display, in a new report by CNET News.com. "The tale of the tape shows that each offers impressive resolution, contrast ratio, and connectivity. The Dell LCD owns the edge in price, costing $2,199 to the Apple's $2,500. To crown the true champion, we took a closer look at each LCD's features, devised a series of performance tests, and let the combatants go toe-to-toe." The Dell display wins in the 'Connectivity & Features' round with more adjustment features and more connectivity options and the 'Day-to-Day' category with better text display, while the Apple's offering wins the Gaming, Video playback, and DisplayMate-based performance tests. Despite taking three of five rounds, the review concludes: "That said, if adjustability is important to you, the Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP has a lot more going for it; in fact, Apple doesn't really compete in this category. Dell also delivers a better variety of input options and better text performance for everyday tasks. Finally, at $300 less than the Apple, the UltraSharp 3007WFP may be the better deal, dollar for dollar."
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Doesn't OS X provide antialiased text all on its own? In other words, since they tested the Dell and the Apple using Windows XP, doesn't the jagged text on the Apple just point out XP's ugly text display limitations?
XP has cleartype which runs rings around OS X's antialiased "stuff". I say this as someone who is running both OS's now.
Considering some of the options for customizing such things, and Quartz's reputation for having very good text rendering, I wonder if the poster that stated XP's smoothing is better just needs to adjust OS X Font Smoothing Style in the preferences.
IMHO I do not think XP's font smoothing is better, but I have also found that satisfaction with font smoothing is VERY subjective with different users preferring different methods. Also XP's GUI irritates me so much I may just miss minor quibbles such as font smoothing techniques.
I seriously doubt you will see either panel decrease in price for a long time. Why? Most large LCD's are going into TV's and have a much lower resolution than these. That translates into lower production and higher cost.
The 30"s are great, but I'll stick with Apple - don't want to ever support Dell in any manner.
"XP has cleartype which runs rings around OS X's antialiased "stuff". I say this as someone who is running both OS's now."
I _HATE_ Cleartype on XP - so much so that I turn it off. Why? Rainbow halos around characters. On OSX with it set to auto I get no rainbows - just pure AA'ed text.