
Tests confirm new iPad’s display is close to studio reference quality - evo_9
http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/20/new-ipad-screen-tests/
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JoelSutherland
Here are the actual numbers from Anandtech (knows displays well):

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/5689/the-new-ipad-retina-
displ...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5689/the-new-ipad-retina-display-
analysis/3)

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.

~~~
jacobolus
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.

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CoffeeDregs
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?

~~~
lkrubner
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.

~~~
bostonpete
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.

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smackfu
"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.

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ableal
I read through the original DisplayMate piece to this linked observation
("Line of Purples") on color gamut: <http://www.displaymate.com/Gamut_6.html>

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.

