This discussion made me want to refresh my understanding of current Apple monitors and if they have anything to offer.
I looked at the Apple Studio Display glossy and matte versions at the Apple store. The matte version uses "nano coating" instead of whatever regular matte LCDs use, and is a $200 addon despite being inferior.
-1 The reflections of the glossy screen are far worse than what you get with most (all?) CRTs. This is standard with LCDs for some reason, they are just perfect mirrors that reflect even a T-shirt in a well lit room.
+1 The pixel density is superb as expected. The difference from average (~100PPI) monitors is night and day. I don't know why for the last 20 years ~100PPI has been standard. It's terrible. For some reason there are almost no monitors with high pixel density other than this Apple and some Dells.
-2 Contrary to the IPS hype of the last decade, the viewing angle is terrible. At a wide angle, (like if you are just standing anywhere near the desk and not bobbing your head down to the level of where it would be if you're sitting) the image is completely washed out. Sitting in front of the white screen at normal distance (a few feet back), the edges are grey. Just moving your head 10 degrees in any direction causes abrupt color / luminance shift on any content. This is exactly the same as all IPS monitors, from $2-$3000. Nothing unexpected here, unless you thought the $1500 price would magically fix this.
+1 I correct myself on one point in previous discussions: The glossy screen is not obscured by grids like with most other glossy LCDs. Normally, with a glossy LCD you still have a very fine grid of black on top of the image, said to be the transistors blocking a small portion of each pixel. Perhaps the high pixel density here alleviates that issue.
+0.5 The color gamut impresses with high saturation. The accuracy and real (as opposed to claimed) coverage, however was not tested. Setting the color gamut to "legacy" modes in the Apple OS menus, like BT. 709 (basically sRGB, as I didn't see an "sRGB" option) made the image too dark and washed out, worse than what you'd get with a standard sRGB IPS LCD as well as disabled the brightness setting for some made up reason.
-1 The input lag was abysmal, as bad as TVs. Which could be due to the fact that the store only has wireless Apple mice, but could also be the monitor itself or the OS or many other things. I tested 4 Apples each hooked up to one of these monitors. Out of 75 monitors I have tested in recent years, only a few (such as the Dell 2407WFP, Dell 2048WFP, and NEC LCD2070NX) come anywhere close to as laggy as this. The lag is too high for even desktop use. For reference it's twice as bad as if you played a video game on 60Hz with vsync. Since the monitor has GBs of RAM I'm leaning toward the lag being from it and not the wireless mouse.
-1 It only does 60Hz which is terrible because that causes intense motion blur. Just scrolling in a web browser drops the resolution below 640x480 and increases the blur above even the cheapest oldest CRT from the 80s.
0 The "nano coating" is worse than average LCD matte coatings. With nano coating, all of the above results were the same, except the image is obscured by what looks like rainbow colored sand, that shifts color when you move your head, just like Dell 2408WFP or Dell 2007FP, from ~2007, or later VA crap from 2012 by BenQ. The grains of sand are finer than those older monitors, but still unignorably visible at normal distance (a few feet back) on a screen of one color or white or some pale color. The glossy version is better (and $200 less).
-1 For a monitor it has terrible unwanted features like built in ultra high res webcam, microphone built in chips which are allegedly just copied from a phone, reportedly with 64GB RAM but "only 2GB is used at any given moment" (whatever that means). Absolute nightmare for security, hopefully you could just mod the monitor and make it take a signal straight to the panel without any of the massive and pointless chips and hidden OS in between. I review only based on image quality but this is too much of an atrocity to ignore, even paying $1500 for hardly anything is not nearly as bad as this.
Rating: 5/10, OLED is better and the poor image quality is not worth the pixel density increase. You're basically getting a premium calculator screen. You're better of just getting a 3840x2160 27" OLED which is 160PPI, a small decrease from 218PPI of the Apple Studio Display. LCD remains a dead end tech, no matter how much premium and "engineering" you add to it. High end CRT is still vastly superior to this, and were half the price, they are slightly blurry but they have superior contrast, no viewing angle issues, no lag, and no motion blur which makes them sharper any time you view a moving image (yep I'm aware that you people don't understand this).
