Fascinating, but I'm curious: does this matter? So I bought a plasma screen television (instead of an LCD) a couple of years ago because the image quality was so much better and the price premium was modest, but I've noticed that LCD seems to have won the screen wars. I assume that this happened because people preferred to pay modestly less for LCDs even if the screen quality was worse. If this is the case, why, besides geekery, would iPad screen quality matter that much?
Listen, my girlfriend is wild about her iPad. She is far more into it than she has ever been into her Mac laptop. For her, the laptop is boring and she uses it for work, but the iPad is her link to her loved ones. Every Saturday she does a Skype call with her parents (who live in Poland). When she is cooking she listens to Polish radio, via the iPad. When she travels she takes the iPad, not the laptop, so she can check her email, and Facebook.
She does not watch much TV, so the quality of a TV would never matter to her. She does not even have cable, or Netflix.
The iPad is the main consumer electronic device in her life. In terms of hours of use per day, she uses the iPad even more than her cellphone. (She has a fairly old and "dumb" cellphone.)
The other day we were walking down the street (Columbus Avenue, up in north Manhattan) and we passed a store that was advertising the new iPad. She wanted to go in and check it out. There is no other electronic device that she would go out of her way to see.
For some people, the quality of the iPad matters far more than the quality of any other consumer electronic device. And these are not necessarily technical people.
The fact that non-technical people love their iPads is clear. But it doesn't automatically follow that the iPad screen quality (v2 to v3) matters much or at all to those users.
The flat panel market is not driven by screen accuracy, as is demonstrated by the consistently over-the-top display settings on every model in the big box retailer. The screens are not shown on the sales floor as accurate, nor could they be as the lighting conditions of the store are far from any average home lighting use. Further, there are few if any models where, once home, unpacked and connected, will provide any presets that are accurate. It takes a concerted effort on the part of the consumer to modify the settings to bring the screen closer to accurate.
But ask any of those new flat panel owners if they'd be willing to give up the flat panel and take their old CRT back, and the answer will be no.
That's essentially the iPad 3 screen compared to the iPad 2 or other tablets. The accuracy is of some interest to professionals in various industries. Though, without built-in color management, the accuracy of the screen may not be of much long term value to those same professionals.
There is one possible longer term affect of the accuracy of the iPad 3 screen: consumer expectations of color accuracy may be set according to this screen and if other tablets fail to deliver close approximations of that accuracy, those tablets may be considered inferior. However, in this case "accuracy" could just as easily be replaced with "looks really good", which doesn't necessarily mean accurate at all. An average flat panel consumer may believe that "brighter is better" (LCDs are known to have higher brightness than Plasma), but their belief doesn't make it true (because it isn't).
It certainly matters to geeks like us, but I also take a certain amount of comfort in knowing normal users are looking at something great, even if they don't quite understand why it's good. Certainly better than pushing junk on ignorant consumers. I'm not an Apple fanboy, but I can't think of too many other companies that would go to these lengths for a consumer product--
Well it means colours are accurate and it can display any colour. It means photos look great, it helps with design because you can see subtler colour layers and stuff.
Which is great in theory until your designs are viewed on not-such-an-awesome screen. In my early web design days I learned that lesson the hard way. Don't get me wrong, I love the iPad and I can't wait until all of our displays are technically on par but until that we still have to worry about "lowest common denominator".
While it would be nice to have all displays be the same and high quality, it only eliminates one dimension. Bad displays and handling their quirks enables you to be aware of more important things like human eyes which have bugs like color blindness.
Essentially it covers sRGB but "only" 65% of Adobe RGB colorspace. For reference, the Apple 27" Cinema Display covers 84% and the Dell 2408WFP covers 104%.
So it's the best mobile display by a margin, but hasn't caught even the consumer studio desktop monitors out there when it comes to Color Gamut.
Given that there’s still no color management of CSS/HTML colors on the web (except as an opt-in feature of Firefox) and web colors are specified to be sRGB, most JPEG images floating around (like those produced by digital cameras) are sRGB, sRGB uses the same primaries as HDTV meaning that it will properly display television and movies, etc. etc., I think an sRGB makes plenty of sense for an iPad.
I don’t know what the color management situation is on iPad apps now, but when I last was looking at iOS development a couple years ago, iPhones/iTouches did no color management of anything, meaning that colors of all apps & content changed from one device generation to another. If that’s still the case, then I think sRGB is the best target display gamut.
By the way, it’s nice to have some numbers, but I don’t especially like the way AnandTech does their charts. Showing each attribute as a single one-dimensional bar chart doesn’t do a good job revealing the trade-offs of display creation.
For example, the Asus Transformer Prime on those charts is shown to have very bright whites and black blacks (which makes it look like the leader in the first few charts), but then you see that it has fairly unsaturated and somewhat odd primaries (the choice of these rather substantially shifts the hue of any images/colors assumed to be sRGB, and makes them a bit dull).
Because these displays work by shining a bright white backlight through colored pixels which block out most of the light, there’s an inherent trade-off between how much light the pixels block (how colorful they can be) and how bright the display is. Since color gamut is three-dimensional, I wish they’d show these kinds of comparisons using some slices through a space like CIECAM02 brightness/colorfulness/hue (QMh), which would actually reasonably show the differences.
"Soneira notes that with some minor calibration, the new iPad’s screen could qualify as a studio reference monitor"
But of course there is no calibration available so...
I'm also wondering about the people who got yellowish iPads, that maybe the color consistency is not where you would want it to be for something that is not calibratable.
I found it concise and interesting in its own right, in particular this bit: Note that consumer content does not include colors outside of the Standard Gamut, so a display with a wider Color Gamut cannot show colors that aren't in the original and will only produce inaccurate exaggerated on-screen colors.
P.S. I also note how much of "seldom occurring" reality inside human vision limits is being chopped off. I'd make an analogy with phone lines: the 300-3400 Hz limits are good enough for direct communication, but the "seldom occurring" higher and lower frequencies are also important.
