Apple Cinema HD Display - LCD display - TFT - 23" - 1920 x 1200 - 200 cd/m2 - 350:1 - 0.258 mm - white

by Apple

Product Details

Product Manual [83kb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 30 pounds
• ASIN: B000067V08
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #33,919 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 20, 2006

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

The Apple Cinema HD is a stunning, all-digital, 23-inch flat-panel display with 1,920 x 1,200 pixel resolution--enough to view high-definition (HD) content with room to spare. It's the ideal display for video professionals using Apple's Final Cut Pro software to edit and write high-definition content. Video and still images are crisp and clear. Colors are vivid and accurate. Text is sharp and easy to read. With a sleek, slim, and breathtaking design, it's the perfect complement to the Power Mac G4 system.

Offering accurate, brilliant color performance, the Cinema HD delivers up to 16.7 million colors across a wide gamut, allowing you to see subtle nuances between colors, from soft pastels to rich jewel tones. A wide viewing angle ensures uniform color from edge to edge. Apple's ColorSync technology lets you create custom profiles to maintain consistent color onscreen and in print. The result is that you can confidently use this display in all your color-critical applications.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

86 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is THE monitor to have for Mac or PC, February 4, 2003

By 

Sparehead2 (New Hampshire, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apple Cinema HD Display - LCD display - TFT - 23" - 1920 x 1200 - 200 cd/m2 - 350:1 - 0.258 mm - white (Electronics)

This monitor was designed to be used with Apple's latest G4 Macintosh product line- A single proprietary cable (called the Apple Display Connector, or ADC) provides power and video information to the monitor as well as USB connectivity to the two port USB hub built into the back of the screen. The 1.5" surrounding bezel is grey, encased in clear plastic, giving it a crystal look matching the G4 Cube or Tower decor.

By utilizing Apple's ADC to DVI Converter (not included- provides backward compatibility with non-ADC Macs such as Apple's Powerbook notebooks) as well as a graphic card with a DVI (Digital Visual Interface) port, such as NVidia's GeForce4 4600 or ATI's 9700 Pro, the Cinema Display can be used by both older Macs and PCs. The converter combines AC power, DVI video data and USB data into one port for the monitor's ADC input cable.

The LCD display is roughly one inch taller and two inches wider than two sheets of paper (8.5 x 11) placed side by side- perfect for displaying two full page word processing documents, web page design, or any other applications which might require a number of simultaneous open windows.

There are three minor issues that I noticed. Most monitors have some kind of adjustment buttons... contrast, brightness, hue, tint, etc. Rather than provide external adjustment buttons, The Apple Cinema Display comes with their Apple Displays Software- Apple's "all digital", Mac-only display adjustment solution. PC users must make adjustments to the display via their videocard's driver software. The two touch sensitive buttons on the front bezel are specifically to turn on a G4 Mac and to access the Apple Displays Software... when attached to a PC with the converter, they serve no purpose (although they glow when touched).

Another caveat... Apple doesn't provide an *.INF file for Windows Plug and Play recognition. Windows XP just lists it as a "Plug and Play Monitor". It's an insignificant detail, but when there are few flaws to speak of, the insignificant ones tend to stand out.

Most flat panel displays are suspended from central hinge and mounted on a stand. The size and weight of the 23" Cinema Display make it difficult to implement this, so it stands on three feet- two 2" legs at the base of the screen and a central leg mounted in the back, similar to how a picture frame stands up. This makes the monitor tilt up at an angle, rather than flat in relation to the viewer. I corrected this by putting a video cassette under the back leg.

My Test System: Athlon 2800+, Asus A7N8X+ motherboard, 1Gb PC3200 DDR RAM, ATI Radeon 9700 Pro

First, I decided to watch a DVD. I had mixed results, but not due to the display.

Wide-format DVDs can be encoded two ways- either in full widescreen leaving the DVD software/player to create the black bars above and below the image when displayed on a standard monitor or television, or it can be encoded with the black bars as part of the video frames. This produces a normal widescreen look on a 4:3 ratio television or monitor, but a widescreen display will display black borders on the sides. As a result, the first TRON DVD release (not the 20th Anniversary Edition) and the theatrical release of DUNE (not the Sci-Fi Channel mini-series) that I watched had a two inch black border surrounding a widescreen video image.

Both Intervideo's WinDVD and Cyberlink's PowerDVD software exhibited the same problem, although PowerDVD does have a software zoom solution that cuts a little bit off of the left and right sides.

Independence Day and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace were a different story though. The Cinema Display has a 16:10 ratio, while standard widescreen format is a 16:9 ratio. Because of this, playback of true widescreen movies on this monitor will still have black bars above and below the video image.

According to the Apple Website, The Cinema Display has "lightning-fast pixel response for full-motion digital video playback." They weren't overstating their claim either... I could not detect any of the "ghosting" that occurs with some LCD monitors when high action/fast movement video sequences are displayed.

Next I tried gaming. The two games I have installed are Funcom's Anarchy Online and Dreamcatcher's Hegemonia: Legions of Doom.

Hegemonia is a 3D space battle strategy game. It had only a few resolutions available in it's graphics options screen- the highest being 1600 x 1200. When I played this game, like the 4:3 ratio DVDs, there were black bars on each side of the screen. This is understandable though- few games are written to take advantage of non-standard screen resolutions. Other than that the image was sharp and clear with no distortions.

Anarchy Online is a "massively multi-player online role-playing game", or MMORPG. It was written to be able to utilize any display resolution, either in fullscreen mode or in a window, and I was able to play the game easily at 1920 x 1200. Every so often, though, I'd see the screen "twitch" as I played the game... It could've been any number of things, from the software itself, to Microsoft's DirectX API, to a build up of static. When I actually started playing the game, (after about 15 minutes of "ooohing" and "ahhhing" over the image) the twitches were hardly noticable... in fact, I've noticed them occurring less and less, which leads me to believe that it was indeed a minor static issue.

Summary: The 23" Apple Cinema Display is, simply put, one of the absolute best displays on the market. ... more.

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Works with Windows XP, August 11, 2002

By 

"eparker47" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apple Cinema HD Display - LCD display - TFT - 23" - 1920 x 1200 - 200 cd/m2 - 350:1 - 0.258 mm - white (Electronics)

Just bought the 23" Apple Cinema display. It works at full res with a GeForce 4 4600 and Windows XP. It has no hardware brightness/contrast controls, but the NVidia driver has these controls + gamma. You can save configurations (such as nighttime, cloudy, office etc) and access them quickly from the taskbar. I have one dead pixel, but at this resolution it is hardly noticeable. You have to buy the DVI to ADC converter to get it to work with an NVidia GeForce card ($$$). There is no loss in quality when using the converter (it is all digital). Color quality and brightness are even across the entire screen. The pixel response is fast for an LCD, but not as quick as a CRT. Still, DVDs and flight simulator rarely exhibit ghosting. Definitely happy with my purchase.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful hardware, but beware of compatibility with Windows, February 29, 2004

By 

Christopher Thomas "consumer" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Apple Cinema HD Display - LCD display - TFT - 23" - 1920 x 1200 - 200 cd/m2 - 350:1 - 0.258 mm - white (Electronics)

As a software developer with broadband internet and a TV tuner in my PC, I usually have a ridiculous number of things on screen at the same time. It's not uncommon to catch me writing code in one window, reading documentation in another, and watching TV in a third. Attaching two side-by-side LCD displays to my PC would manage this just fine, and probably more cheaply to boot.

But I also like to play games and watch movies, and for that, I wanted a single large panel. The only thing that fit the bill was the Apple display.

I purchased it after much ogling of showroom displays, and attached it to my PC's DVI port (with the help of Apple's DVI-to-ADC adapter). Windows XP detected the new monitor, my video card (ATI 9700 Pro AIW) recognized the higher resolutions, and I was instantly using Windows in crystal-clear 1920x1200 resolution, with no dead pixels.

There are a few negatives:

- The brightness does drop a bit at about 45 degrees, so the sides of the screen may appear darker than the center, but only if you sit really close to it, and are really paying attention.
- On a PC, the Power and Brightness buttons do nothing (except glow in a really cool way when touched). You'll have to use whatever display settings your video card driver provides for color, brightness, contrast, etc. As for turning it off, you'll have to either use Windows' screen-saver option for powering the display down after a few minutes, or unplug it.
- The two built-in USB ports don't suport USB 2.0.
- The ADC connector is proprietary to Apple computers (and only a few models - go figure), so you'll have to buy an adapter (either VGA-ADC or DVI-ADC) to hook it up to your PC.
- Even with my Apple-manufactured DVI-ADC adapter, I get a small amount of "static", especially on black backgrounds. My eyes are trained not to notice it anymore, but considering how pricey these are, it's annoying. UPDATE: I have since found a setting in the ATI configuration that fixes this ('Alternate DVI operational mode'). So this is no longer an issue.
- On my PC, the display doesn't show anything until Windows XP has started up. This means you can't see the BIOS diagnostics or boot menu. On forums, some people have reported this as a problem, and some say it works fine for them. If anything ever goes wrong with the boot process, I'm not sure what I'll do.