30" Cinema display

This post may reveal the limitations of my IQ but.... I recently purchased the 30" Apple Cinema display (and switched to the Nvidia Geforce 6800 card) because I will be working with a substantial amount of HDV and DVCPRO HD material for the forseeable future and wanted the ability to use the HD preview option to monitor and also because it's just a damn cool thing to have on your desk. Here's the dumb part- I've gone from using two studio displays to one of these behemoths and when I select "Standard" from the "Arrange" sub-menu, "fit to window" makes the picture 117%. Selecting "Two Up" makes it 177%!!! Needless to say, the image quality is crap. I'm still using an NTSC monitor but it's of no use with HDV or HD.
Am I overlooking something incredibly simple here or have I gone about my HD transition entirely the wrong way by buying this drive-in movie screen of a monitor. Is there a way to arrange the canvas and viewer so that they are both at 100% without making them postage stamps on this vast canvas?

Thanks

SEXY-ASS monitor! and who are we kidding, thats why you bought it right? - ha ha... still i'd have suggested buying 2, 23"ers instead

that being said - (using the striped area in the lower rights of the windows) you can drag any window you want to any size you want and then you can save your own settings at the bottom of the window>arrange menu.

would that take care of your problem?

Part of the reason the quality may not seem as good as it should be is because of the resolution and the fact that it is a large panel. The graphics card has to scale the HD image (720p or 1080i) to the resolution being used by the canvas or viewer or the whole monitor if you preview fullscreen. That means you are not seeing the image in its true resolution. This a lot of times results in a softer, fuzzier picture.

There is also the issue with LCD having a limitation with black levels. LCDs, even the best, cannot create a true black color. If you make the whole screen go black you will still see light behind it. LCD panels are very thin, so light from the flourescent light panels behind the LCD still gets through. This results in colors not being as good as they should. Of course, if you have a lot of lighter colors on the screen and/or around the black colors, then it will look pretty black to your eyes. That has to do with contrast.

I have a 30" and experience the same thing as you. I also have a plasma HDTV. I hooked up the second DVI out on my 6800 to the HDMI input on my plasma so I can show my previews there. The picture seems sharper and the colors are much more natural and vibrant. It is a much more accurate picture.

I thought about getting two 23" monitors instead as well. There were two main reasons I went with the 30": 1) Sometimes I want to use a much larger screen for a single app, such as Maya, Photoshop, or even to web pages opened side by side in separate windows (that's particularly cool to me for some reason). 2) There is a common flaw with Apple's 23" displays. The menu bar at the top has a somewhat purple-ish/pink-ish tint to it, instead of the real light gray it should be. Next time you are at an Apple store take a look at them and you will see what I'm talking about (unless they've fixed them). Oh, and you can't forget that a 30" monitor just looks jaw-droppingly cool.



Post Edited (07-18-05 22:19)

-Mike

when i was looking at new monitors a few months back, i sat in front of a 30" and just said "DAMN! a monitor CAN be TOO big!" i got "tennis spectator neck" just going from the apple menu to the dock...

Well, I suppose I just answered my own question the first time I started a project with the HDV codec. This monitor comes alive. The picture quality is astonishing!!!! When I was screwing around with it previously I was looking at a Dv project.