Santa Rosa Macbook Pro LCD- issues??

[GlennChan]

I am the proud new owner of a 15" Santa Rosa MBP... I'm noticing some issues that would make it unsuitable/far-from-ideal for monitoring.

Looking through its ICC profile, I notice that the display has a pretty narrow gamut... smaller than sRGB. Some LED-backlit displays are capable of wider than 709/sRGB gamut, but this display is the opposite. Extremely saturated colors get clipped. :(

EDIT: To clarify about LED backlighting... there's two different ways of doing it. One way is to use red, green, and blue LED backlights (three colors of LEDs). This produces the very wide color gamut. The other way is to use a white LED backlight (a single color of LED backlight). It has less problems with uniformity and allows for a thinner panel. With the r/g/b LED backlight approach, you have to diffuse the light to make it really even (this takes space and/or a large number of LEDs; to lower costs, you want to use less LEDs). AFAIK.

2- Other less annoying issues:
--There are some banding issues on gradients after calibration. (Though I'm not 100% sure on the dithering and calibration path with Colorsync. I believe the panel is inherently 6-bit, which you can't fully get around.)
--Ghosting (especially apparent on text and finely contrasting lines, which flicker with movement)
--Viewing angle.. very strict, your head only has 1/2 inches up/down.

--Not quite uniform at the edges... it gets a little darker.

--Black level could be better (relative to what's ideal).

[Cail Young]

I believe the panel is inherently 6-bit, which you can't fully get around.

This is what I've heard, indeed a class-action suit was proposed due to the advertising of "millions of colours" in the Apple literature when 6-bit would only allow hundreds of thousands.

[GlennChan]

To me the banding issues is not that bothersome compared to the limited gamut.

If you display a gradient, the fully saturated end will experience clipping. This is much more noticeable than any banding.

[Rick Darge]

how does this compare to the older LCDs, before they made the switch to LED?

[Jason Murphy]

Unfortunately, it looks like all of the consumer-level Mac products (MacBook/Pro, iMac) are unsuitable for significant monitoring or even remotely color-critical work at the moment.

Not only are the panels on the laptops 6-bit (which isn't a new thing; don't know if there are any 8-bit laptop panels out there), but both new iMac models have really significant problems with consistent brightness on the displays; the 20" is much brighter on the bottom than it is on top, and the 24" iMac is about a stop darker on the right side of the display than the left. This seems to be across the entire line, and not just a problem with a few displays, too. It's a real shame.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1093045

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5156917

[GlennChan]

Well at least you can still use a broadcast monitor. Critical monitoring on a laptop is probably expecting too much...