Apple 23-Inch Cinema HD Display

Artwork by Rick Rizner, John Goddard

We recently retested Apple's 23-Inch Cinema HD Display under our current lighting conditions. With its satiny aluminum finish and elegant, one-cord design, this wide-screen LCD monitor looks as lovely as ever. But this dazzler goes light on screen adjustments--its triad of buttons controls brightness and power only. If you're a PC user, you'd better hope you love the picture, since won't you get much chance to change it: Most of the changes can be made only on a system that uses the Mac OS.

Then again, the 23-Inch Cinema HD Display's image quality may not require users to change the screen settings. Our jury of testers was particularly impressed by the natural skin tones in our group portrait test screen and the balance of color it provided in the test screen of a fruit tart. This LCD's ability to show crisp text--even in the tiny type in our multisize fonts and Microsoft Excel test screens--helped it gain the highest text score we've awarded recently. It also earned the highest overall performance score among current 23- and 24-inch LCD monitors, as well as a performance rating of Superior.

Though we connected the 23-inch Cinema HD Display to a PC for jury testing--just as we do with all of the monitors we test in the PC World Test Center--we later hooked it up to an Apple PowerBook to see what it could do when running on its native operating system. The answer: A lot more. The display controls in the Mac OS X operating system offer text smoothing, four screen modes, and very detailed color profiles. The controls permit advanced users tweak the white point and gamma settings.

Unfortunately, since these settings are controlled within the OS instead of via menus in the monitor, the 23-Inch Cinema HD Display offers few adjustment options for intermediate users who plan to connect the monitor to a PC. There's little flexibility in the stand, either; it tilts but lacks height, swivel, and pivot adjustments.

Apple offers only a few crumbs of tech support for the 23-Inch Cinema HD Display. The parts and labor warranty runs only a year, and tech support is stingy, too: 12 hours a day for the first 90 days only. Of course, when the only buttons correspond to "brighter," "darker," and "on/off," there's only so much tech support you could need.

With crisp text and gorgeous color, this is a great display. But it doesn't make the transition from Apple to Windows well.

Artwork by Rick Rizner, John Goddard

Photograph by Rick Rizner

Photograph by Rick Rizner