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emraha06

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 1, 2017
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As it is discussed before, MacBook Pro 16 has terrible smearing display. Do M1 chip models use the same panel? What is the pixel response time of new serie panels?
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,522
19,679
Response time of any high-quality display is going to be bad — that's not what they are optimized for.
 

emraha06

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 1, 2017
285
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Response time of any high-quality display is going to be bad — that's not what they are optimized for.
High quality for what purpose? Only photo editing? Or picture viewer? What about creating animations or editing 60fps movies? Pixel response time has to be 16 miliseconds or lower if you want to Edit 60 fps video or animation but mbp 16 has approximately 34 and 52 miliseconds black to white and grey to grey. What kind of quality display is this? You can not scroll a web page with eye comfort because pixels lose their minds if there is a dynamic view and terrible smearing texts and images occur...
 
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leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
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High quality for what purpose? Only photo editing? Or picture viewer? What about creating animations or editing 60fps movies? Pixel response time has to be 16 miliseconds or lower if you want to Edit 60 fps video or animation but mbp 16 has approximately 34 and 52 miliseconds black to white and grey to grey. What kind of quality display is this? You can not scroll a web page with eye comfort because pixels lose their minds if there is a dynamic view and terrible smearing texts and images occur...

High quality as in high DPI, wide color gamut and high color accuracy. Only gaming panels have low response times, because competitive gaming is pretty much the only domain where these things really matter.

Look around for display reviews: virtually all high-end workstation laptops with excellent screens have response times of 40 milliseconds or more. That is the price you pay for optimizing for picture quality while having reasonable power consumption. Maybe a video professional could comment why professional monitors make this tradeoff and whether it is really as big of a problem as you claim.

Regarding scrollign texts... I have been using an 16" for almost a year now daily, and I don't have any problem with any kind of smearing. Which is funny, considering that all my work is text-based (programming, academic publications and teaching).
 

jay-m

macrumors member
Oct 30, 2019
32
30
I cannot find the post, but I read on this forum few days ago that MBP M1 13" does not smear like 16" does, it was in one of "I just got my new Mac, ask me anything" threads.
 
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emraha06

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 1, 2017
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High quality as in high DPI, wide color gamut and high color accuracy. Only gaming panels have low response times, because competitive gaming is pretty much the only domain where these things really matter.

Look around for display reviews: virtually all high-end workstation laptops with excellent screens have response times of 40 milliseconds or more. That is the price you pay for optimizing for picture quality while having reasonable power consumption. Maybe a video professional could comment why professional monitors make this tradeoff and whether it is really as big of a problem as you claim.

Regarding scrollign texts... I have been using an 16" for almost a year now daily, and I don't have any problem with any kind of smearing. Which is funny, considering that all my work is text-based (programming, academic publications and teaching).
Wow, what a definition... High end workstation :) okey could you please explain this: you are an animation maker and decided to make an 60fps animation, in some where you want to add smearing effect. But when you did this a problem knocked your door. Knock knock. Who is there? I am MacBook Pro 16 display with terrible pixel response time. I have already natural smearing because of my high end workstation design so you have also added a smearing effect. How will you calibrate this because this animation will be played on quality low pixel response time displays.
You: 404 not found...
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,522
19,679
Wow, what a definition... High end workstation :) okey could you please explain this: you are an animation maker and decided to make an 60fps animation, in some where you want to add smearing effect. But when you did this a problem knocked your door. Knock knock. Who is there? I am MacBook Pro 16 display with terrible pixel response time. I have already natural smearing because of my high end workstation design so you have also added a smearing effect. How will you calibrate this because this animation will be played on quality low pixel response time displays.
You: 404 not found...

I am not an animator, so I cannot comment on the workflows. The only think I can tell you that ALL high-end laptop workstations, including the ones with the best display on the planet (HP Z-Books with DreamColor) have very slow panels. Must be still worth the tradeoff to graphics professionals if they are buying these $5000 laptops.
 

bill-p

macrumors 68030
Jul 23, 2011
2,929
1,589
High quality for what purpose? Only photo editing? Or picture viewer? What about creating animations or editing 60fps movies? Pixel response time has to be 16 miliseconds or lower if you want to Edit 60 fps video or animation but mbp 16 has approximately 34 and 52 miliseconds black to white and grey to grey. What kind of quality display is this? You can not scroll a web page with eye comfort because pixels lose their minds if there is a dynamic view and terrible smearing texts and images occur...

Faster response time greatly increases power consumption. It's quite simple, really: you want a pixel to change fast, that means it needs to get from value A to value B fast. The only way that'll happen is if you give it more "power" to do so.

That coupled with wider color gamut plus higher resolution in the display is a combination that is... let's say undesirable in a laptop or portable device. You can easily see that all laptops with UHD 4K screens suck more battery than a 1080p counterpart.

You may be tempted to say "but iPad Pro"... but honestly, the iPad Pro doesn't last 20 hours on battery, right? Meanwhile, the MacBook Pro 13" with its "smearing display" gets 20 hours, with a much more powerful SoC to boot. I'm sure Apple could add a 120Hz display into the MacBook Pro 13" but... what's even the point? To satisfy "professional animators"?

Also, if you're a professional animator, you wouldn't really want to work all the time on a 13" or 16" screen anyways. Hell, you won't even look at the MacBook Pro 13" or 16" in the first place. The MacBooks are great portable computers, but a professional animator will want much more graphics horsepower than whatever the M1 can muster, plus a much bigger screen to work with. The latter is almost a requirement due to the many things they need to see on the screen... such as all of the tools, plus the timeline. Source: I have a friend who works at Blizzard.

So response time is not the only thing that matters.

Personally, I'd trade some smear while scrolling for longer battery life any day. It's not like I pay very close attention to the screen when scrolling anyways. Plus I don't see why you're making this out to be a problem now. MacBook screens have always been "smeary" like this to me.
 

retta283

Suspended
Jun 8, 2018
3,180
3,482
I first read the title as "smelling", and thought, "OK, here we go, Stink-Gate ..."
Such a thing has existed before, the iBook G3 series had keyboards that were infamous for smelling like sweat after a while, majority of the ones you find today have this issue.

Just curious, what's the average response time of a higher end Windows laptop these days? Any good video examples of ghosting windows/text? ON my older MacBooks you can see the Finder windows leaving large ghost trails for a second, very noticeable.
 
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leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
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Just curious, what's the average response time of a higher end Windows laptop these days? Any good video examples of ghosting windows/text? ON my older MacBooks you can see the Finder windows leaving large ghost trails for a second, very noticeable.

Laptops known for high-quality displays? They are all in the ballpark of >=40ms grey to grey. Here are some comparisons by notebookcheck (scroll down to display section):



 

theorist9

macrumors 68040
May 28, 2015
3,882
3,061
Response time of any high-quality display is going to be bad — that's not what they are optimized for.
What about OLED monitors? Don't they have sub-millisecond grey-to-grey? And is there any chance Apple would put them in its laptops?

I know this isn't the category you were thinking of, since this thread is about laptops, but it's worth noting the finest reference monitors in the world, such as the 4k Sony Trimaster, use OLED panels with response times in the microsecond range. And they consider this response time an important feature for video editing. So it is possible to get both reference quality, and fast response time, at least in a desktop monitor, and at the upper end of the price scale.
 

theorist9

macrumors 68040
May 28, 2015
3,882
3,061
High quality for what purpose? Only photo editing? Or picture viewer? What about creating animations or editing 60fps movies? Pixel response time has to be 16 miliseconds or lower if you want to Edit 60 fps video or animation but mbp 16 has approximately 34 and 52 miliseconds black to white and grey to grey. What kind of quality display is this? You can not scroll a web page with eye comfort because pixels lose their minds if there is a dynamic view and terrible smearing texts and images occur...
If you're doing critical video editing work, would you really be editing on a laptop monitor? I would think a laptop monitor would be more for prototyping/exploratory work. Though as far as smearing during scrolling goes, I do agree with you.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,522
19,679
What about OLED monitors? Don't they have sub-millisecond grey-to-grey? And is there any chance Apple would put them in its laptops?

No idea, do you know of any creative workstation that ships with an OLED montor?

I know this isn't the category you were thinking of, since this thread is about laptops, but it's worth noting the finest reference monitors in the world, such as the 4k Sony Trimaster, use OLED panels with response times in the microsecond range. And they consider this response time an important feature for video editing. So it is possible to get both reference quality, and fast response time, at least in a desktop monitor, and at the upper end of the price scale.

Well, sure, but you are talking about what, $40,000 professional displays? I don't think this technology will be relevant to laptops any time soon. And current mainstream affordable OLED panels don't seem to have the image quality suitable for professional work (at any rate all "cheap" pro displays seem to use IPS technology).
 

TrueBlou

macrumors 601
Sep 16, 2014
4,531
3,619
Scotland
Wow, what a definition... High end workstation :) okey could you please explain this: you are an animation maker and decided to make an 60fps animation, in some where you want to add smearing effect. But when you did this a problem knocked your door. Knock knock. Who is there? I am MacBook Pro 16 display with terrible pixel response time. I have already natural smearing because of my high end workstation design so you have also added a smearing effect. How will you calibrate this because this animation will be played on quality low pixel response time displays.
You: 404 not found...


Attach an external monitor?

If you need the kind of monitor performance you're alluding to, surely you're not going to torture yourself by spending your entire working life on a 13, or even 16 inch monitor?

Ok, ok, I'll concede that for some people it may not be an option, at least until they save a little more. But it would drive me mental if I had to restrict myself to such a small screen ad infinitum. I've already purchased a new 28" 4K display for when my new M1 replaces my 27" iMac come Christmas. I can cope on a small screen just fine for hours, days even, but I couldn't do it forever. I could be in a minority of course.
 

theorist9

macrumors 68040
May 28, 2015
3,882
3,061
No idea, do you know of any creative workstation that ships with an OLED montor?
Not qute workstation-class, but there's the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XB. They claim "Each panel is X-Rite Pantone certified and color-calibrated at the factory." According to https://www.cnet.com/reviews/gigabyte-aero-15-oled-review/ , it Samsung's laptop OLED panel isn't quite yet able the compete with the best pro-grade IPS laptop panels for color accuracy:

Though not as robust as the color management of a mobile workstation, which generally has profiles stored in hardware, it's one of the broader systems I've seen in a prosumer laptop. For example, it comes with a Pantone-certified software profile for print work, plus four color temperature software-calibration profiles (D5800, D6000, D6500 and D6800), which you can swap among via the ControlCenter rather than using Windows' system. Oddly, the Native profile it loads is sRGB rather than just a full-monitor gamut, which is what "native" usually means in this context.

Since all OLED laptops use the same Samsung panel, the software profiling and supporting hardware are what differentiates them from each other. In this case, it makes it a lot more out-of-the-box flexible than the one-profile-fits-all versions of other OLED laptops I've tested.

As tested (using Portrait Displays' Calman 5 Ultimate and an X-Rite i1Display Pro), the display is very accurate for a nonpro screen. It covers 100% of DCI-P3 and about 93% of the Adobe RGB color gamuts, all the white points come within 250K of their targets, gamma is very consistently close to 2.2 above 20% gray (OLED gamma has a discontinuity roughly below 20% because it has different shadow-detail characteristics than monitors with less perfect blacks, for which a gamma of 2.2 became standard) and the gray scale is reasonably neutral. For colors, it's very accurate at maximum brightness -- I was told it was calibrated to 100% brightness for Adobe RGB and it might be even better at lower brightness levels -- and with just a little tweaking could probably hit anyone's accuracy threshold.

Because of different implementations, brightness varies across the OLED panels, too. I somehow managed to register a peak brightness of over 600 nits for a 10% window in HDR mode, though most often that will be closer to about 415 nits, and full-screen maximum brightness for normal work is around 350 nits.

Here's a full workstation that ships with that panel; but its accuracy seems worse than on the Gigabyte


Well, sure, but you are talking about what, $40,000 professional displays? I don't think this technology will be relevant to laptops any time soon. And current mainstream affordable OLED panels don't seem to have the image quality suitable for professional work (at any rate all "cheap" pro displays seem to use IPS technology).
Of course, and I explictly acknowledged in my post that the Trimaster was an entirely different class of product. Nevertheless, thought it important to note that while your statement ("Response time of any high-quality display is going to be bad — that's not what they are optimized for.") seems to currently be true for laptops, it isn't true generally—the technology exists to have both. There's just a big cost in power efficiency and cash.
 

Gnattu

macrumors 65816
Sep 18, 2020
1,107
1,672
What about creating animations or editing 60fps movies
The industry you mentioned is still working on 30 even 24fps. For animation, each frame costs money, and for 60fps you are literally spending money on drawing double frames.
 

Brovatar

macrumors newbie
Apr 8, 2018
24
12
London, UK
I have a 16 inch MBP and the smearing is terrible IMO. That was the first thing I noticed when I upgraded from a late 2013 rMBP.

To all apologists who say it’s supposedly because of the display’s better color accuracy I will say: iPad Pro with the same M1 chip as in the new Macbook Air has a wonderful color accurate 120Hz screen that is miles more pleasurable to use than one in my 16 inch MBP.
 
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