30-inch Apple Cinema Display vs. Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP

Executive summary, 30-inch Apple Cinema Display vs. Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP, and how C|Net let down their readership, googlers, diggers and the like with shoddy reviews.

Apple M9179LL/A and DELL 3007wfp comparison. Both use identical LG panels, but:

+ Apple has color workflow software SWOP
+ Apple is more evenly lit.
+ Apple is quieter
+ Apple has more tilt (that counts)
+ Apple wins on build quality (from what I read)
+ Apple has simpler connections (wires)
+/- Apple 2 port USB 2.0 Hub
+ Apple 2 FireWire 400 ports
+/- Dell has USB ports (4) and 9-in-2 media card reader
+ Apple 27.5 pounds
- Dell 35.24 pounds (128% heavier)
+ Both have brightness adjust
+ Apple 150W
- DELL 147W to 177W

Either display you get, you can thank the people at LG that you will be happy, contented, and can disregard any pompous reviews online. You can be happy your display was quieter (V. important! unless you listen to music… through noise cancellation headphones…), cheaper, better looking, SWOP compliant, apple, or dell. Whatever makes the decision right for you is right for you. The idea is, who built a better display using the same screen. Weight, power consumption, dust retention, noise, lighting and quality of connections and cables are some thing you would look for in this case.

I’d say get an Apple screen, because the resell will be higher, and you can sell it more readily to Mac users and PC users alike. I also would pay for the quietness, I won’t go into the prices, and they will get out of date, but the apple is going to be more expensive. Read on for the full whack, and a hearty stab at the idotic report on these screens that was presented on C|Net. (lots of swearing, please cover your eyes as you read)

Lara Luepke joins the ranks of idiotic writers who misinform, such as the likes of Dana Blakenhorn, the hack writer, who argues that because his writing *is a blog* it is magically exempt from any requirement of credibility. What a fucking moron. I am still writing my cutting reply to that one.

Anyway, back to the twatish ramblings of Lara Luepke, an ‘assistant editor’ at C|Net. She wrote the 30-inch Apple Cinema Display vs. Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP review. Oh boy, Apple 30″ versus Dell 30″. Both using the same displays. Even an Apple site recently noted that Apple updated its specs to the new version of the display, but they weren’t accurate in writing that, they simply said ‘Apple had changed the specs on the website’. FFS, if you are the type of person to report that, spend 20 minutes finding out something, and report that Apple use the same latest version of the LG display as Dell.

Now, there displays, same screen, manufactured differently. There are some crucial points to make. Let’s get it right. Let’s look at backlighting, connections, warranty, then look at colour callibration, gamut (should be the same) and how the design choices affect the user.
No. Let’s Fuck the world, and write some nonsense trite bollocks.

A 17-inch LCD monitor is big enough for most people’s everyday computing needs. But for others, 17 inches simply will not do–nor will 19, 20, or 24 inches.

Honestly, We have all sat down and thought, how do I start this report/blog/ransom note, but calling on the help of captain obvious is just procrastinating. Man that feels like a dirty word now that every angsty teenager puts it as their hobby on myspace. Anyway.

Here is how I would have started:

Choosing a 30″ display is a significant investment, while people will choose this category of display purely for size, for their movies and gaming, the discerning audience would be a film editor, designer or engineer who will work the display up close and personal.

This sets a tone, for a review that gets drop-and-cough personal with the display.

Now, the categories they chose to review are:

1. Connectivity / Features
2. Day to Day Use
3. Gaming
4. Video
5. DisplayMate tests

So they switch between specific definitions (connectivity) and test criteria that could mean anything. Day to Day Use? Reading into the section, ‘Day to Day’ actually mentions a target audience, and then says:

Though both the Apple Cinema Display and the Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP are intended primarily for graphic artists and other professionals, sometimes those users, too, will check e-mail, surf the Web, scroll through spreadsheets, and view online photo albums.

You don’t fucking say? Stop writing like an eight year old, and write the criterion as text quality. Now, to compound the poor writing, we get to an area that is rife with poor journalism. It is simply inaccurate. Lies.

Brace yourselves:

In all of our text-based tests, the UltraSharp 3007WFP trumped the Apple Cinema Display with its antialiasing ability–that is, smoothing out corners and jagged edges to provide more readable text and shaper images

What the fuck are they talking about? Oh look, they even linked the term antialiasing, in case the target audience of this review need to look it up. What the fuck are they talking about.

What the fuck is Lara Luepke writing about, on a fucking C|Net article? What is that Dana Blankenthorn [sic]? Maybe I should ask her if it is a blog, and therefore she doesn’t need to atone for this? Why don’t you shut the fuck up and play with your beard. You know having a beard costs you more in fuel for your car? You are singlehandedly fucking our ecosystem and you want ot be taken seriously?

Once more, for effect:

What the fuck is Lara Luepke writing about?

So here is a the first crime against the readers of C|Net, oh how I pity them, and the readers of Digg, and every other site that linked to this. I don’t pity the readers of the fucking gay engadget website.

Engadget, being utter fucking morongs who deserve a painful death over 25 years, watching everything they hold dear crushed before them, like to link to sites, give a breathless ‘OMG we gave it away’ tag, so you don’t have to read the site, and then put a link at the bottom of the post which says:

read

You click that to see the link. What fucking assfuckers they are. They don’t even link to news, they just steal it. Which means, they also steal your chance to decide if the ‘news’ is real or not. Digg is a news link site. Engaydget is a news theft site. A pathetic one at that. Sadly, dim witted wanker types at microsoft thought they were being bleeding edge by including this weblogs/inc crap on their pages, so no doubt lots of people whose foreheads overheat during normal functioning tend to read those sites, and unfortunately you cannot remove economic power from all morons.

Back on track. The monitor has NO MOTHERFUCKING ANTIALIASING. How long as this story been up, what the fuck, has nobody spotted it? I saw some people on Digg talking about it, are they waiting to dismember Lara Luepke before taking this shit down?

Antialiasing is a feature of the application (not OS as other people are saying) While antialiasing *MAY* be implemented at OS level, support is application based. Also applications could feasibly have their own anti-aliasing. The smooth text in games is anti-aliased inside the graphics card, if it is polygon based. bitmapped text is smoothed like any other texture.

So knowing that, what the fuck has your test criteria got to do with anything? In addition, you place text and colour in criterion one, but don’t actually talk about colour until later.

So the entire category is redundant. Worthless, in fact, merely damaging information to many potential buyers. A disservice. A liability.

Back to criterion one:

Apple has a nice clean cable. Which is very frikking good. I have to clean up my cables, and when I add a new test box is is living hell, I like this. It also has a smooth +5-25 degrees of tilt.

Apple has more tilt. 5 forward 25 back, Dell has 5 forward, 15 back. If I trust the C|Net figures. Perhaps monitor height adjust is good, but I would get a monitor stand. Would that clutter my desk? Negate the clean lines of the monitor? Well, 4 inches certainly isn’t going to help either way.

Swivel? Why do you need swivel? Turn the base on your desk, ‘boom’, magic 360 swivel.

Tilt is the key factor here, and apple has more tilt.

Tilt: Apple

Cables: I will admit to neither knowing or caring about ‘dual link’ DVI-D versus DVI, the reviewer seems to not have a clue either and uses them interchangeably. I guess both work. I use BNC type cable at work (like http://www.national-tech.com/specs/10h1-18101.htm). I like the tidy approach.

Dell’s green rendering appeared slightly richer than Apple’s.

Is this even possible? I know Apple’s screen at tuned from factory, and Dell’s probably aren’t… so weird. I don’t want richness. I want Fidelity. If it looks great on my screen, but shit and washed out on my customers, what good is a screen that gives me a false impression? Of course, you can never know what it will look like on your customers, but if it takes a dull green/grey and makes it look eye peeling lime, you are stupid.

In the gaming section, I don’t know what to believe, the writer seems to imply the Dell’s out of factory config compresses some levels of colour. At least on their test machine. After the whole ‘antialiasing’ remark, I am stumped.

Video

Both monitors displayed a fair amount of digital noise, seen as static in blocks of color, during full-screen playback, which is typical for large LCD screens. From a few feet back, the digital noise was hardly noticeable, but at close range, the Apple Cinema Display showed slightly less noise.

Again, after the remarks of the antialiasing, I am puzzled by this. In a black area.. you see black digital noise? I am sure the reviewer say a warmth rendering over the compressed areas of the image so the eye wouldn’t see blocks of colour. One machine must have had a slightly higher brightness, so they thought the screen was ‘less noisey’. LCD screens are not like digital cameras you fucking twat. They do not have noise because of some analogue to digital conversion in a CCD. The connection may have been an issue, but you know what I believe? Dust that creates a moiré pattern is one thing I can think of.

My impression: disregard this criterion. Shit, that is ALL of them so far that are redundant.

And then some more about colour:

In the blue-and-green-dominated video, however, the Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP’s colors looked over-saturated compared to the still vibrant but more natural appearance of the Apple Cinema Display. Some viewers would interpret the UltraSharp 3007WFP’s over-saturation as a more vivid picture, but we think the Cinema Display’s rendering was more realistic.

You’d think a nice discussion on this would highlight that Apple is firm about how the colour is SWOP integrated, allowing you to ensure color fidelity levels for any other device. Make you LCD look like an EPSON plotter. Or a fabric dye machine. Or, like its default calibrated profile.

Both screens are capable, I just honestly think there is a difference in the way things work here. The physical gamut is identical, but Apple went the extra step in tuning them and getting the correct profile.

The DisplayMate test is supposedly about color, but knowing the brightness settings haven’t even been discussed, you cannot trust a thing said here. They haven’t even acknowledged that they are the same display. Not that I know that for sure, but they came from the same place. Who knows about the variety of QC options they are given.

with the UltraSharp 3007WFP exhibiting a very small bright spot in the bottom-left corner.

Perhaps, the only, and I mean ONLY interesting thing in this article that points to something resembling information. Thanks to eiyaou for a great (and only great) comment on the article http://reviews.cnet.com/5420-10442_7-0.html?forumID=104&messageID=1838181&threadID=165366 , which says:

That’s not a fair comparison. You missed some key factors and over weighted some other factors.
What did you miss?
1. Noise. The apple cinema is extremely quiet.
2. Heat. Please compare them see which one is cooler man.
3. Dust resistance. If you put a monitor over there for a month, you know there is dust and you have to clean them. From the look of that, the Apple cinema would win this.
4. Power usuage.
5. Weight.

When comparing height and tilt adjustments, you really can’t judge them by stats. You need expert knowledge in egomonics and analyze a whole spectrums of user needs and
work arounds and see which monitor provided the best user
satisifaction. Height adjustment for example, you can always
put a book underneath it man. But of course you still have to analyze if the user is satisfied with that and if that is safe.

Sorry for ripping your whole comment, but it is good! I feel like Engaydget now. Edit: I answered the quesiton on weight. The Apple wins. Apple also seems to win on power usage, they quote 150, DELL quote 147W to 177W.

So, not surprising, C|Net gives a chance for these idiots to write things, after chewing on their cheap and no doubt toxic painted pencils their suppressed thought mechanism struggles to produce this. Why is it annoying?

Because, sadly, and yet, logically, not everyone reading this shit is an informed screen expert. Now you have the blind leading the blind. As is so common in this blog saturated world of crap.

Edit: Updated and spell checked, who’d have thought my rampant ramblings could help inform. I left most of the naughty words in there. If you are offended, pull out a permanent marker, and black out your screen to obscure the words. Just don’t scroll the page or you will have to repeat the procedure. lol.