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MP 7,1 XDR Display Dim Compared to LG 5K Display
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In the past threads, I have described the XDR as 'more muted' than the office iMac Late 2015 5k screen. Maybe we are describing the similarity. There are a lot of earlier created threads about the XDR with some having similar exchanges as this one.
Yeah, I see 1600 nits and see that it is more muted. How is this possible? Sure doesn’t look or feel like it and for that price... wow.
If you're not outputting high brightness content, an XDR running in P3-500 and one running in P3-1600 will output the very same level of brightness.
If you seek more brightness: there's a slider for that in the control panel
The maximum it can output is for content that uses the capabilities of the display. Not general higher brightness.
To see what the monitor can do: head over in chrome to youtube ad search for HDR content...
Play that and you'll see the much higher brightness is content that uses it.
E.g. try something like this:
(in chrome! - Youtube doesn't send the HDR content to Safari for some reason)
If you seek more brightness: there's a slider for that in the control panel
The maximum it can output is for content that uses the capabilities of the display. Not general higher brightness.
To see what the monitor can do: head over in chrome to youtube ad search for HDR content...
Play that and you'll see the much higher brightness is content that uses it.
E.g. try something like this:
The whole point is that there's nothing wrong, nothing that needs fixing.
E.g. for safari: There's currently next to no high gamut content out on the web (AFAIK the stuff needed to support it in CSS is not even a standard yet) and most other things like the internal tools do not need it either: they work just fine in a normal color space.
If you want it brighter just crank up the brightness and turn off the automatic adjustment.
Over time I think there's going to be more high gamut content, but aside of video there's next to none right now IMHO.
Just to give a relative idea from another user: I have brightness set to ~60%. It's quite bright, and pushing it to 100% is ridiculously bright, I can feel my pupils tighten in a daylight-lit room with a bright 5000k LED overhead. My old mac is still running my LED Cinema display right next to it. I see I have it normally set to ~80%. 100% is not remotely close to the brightness of the XDR at 100%.
As people have already alluded to, what you are getting is exactly as expected.
As someone who nearly bought the XDR display, went to check it out and compared it against a 5K iMac, I realised that it was not a good display for me. Because 500 nits is what is being used most of the time and to get above that you have to use HDR content. It says it on the tech specs: SDR brightness: 500 nits. So if you aren't working in video, the benefit of the XDR display is questionable.
Now to answer why it is less bright than the 5k display at the same brightness, even though they are both 500 nits... When I saw it in person, I noticed this too. The reason is there are so many more layers in the XDR display compared to the 5k display (e.g. color transformation sheet, Micro-lens array) that makes it look less clear with a slight cloudiness to it.
In the end I cancelled my order and got an iMac Pro because it was a better display for my use cases and a quieter machine.
As someone who nearly bought the XDR display, went to check it out and compared it against a 5K iMac, I realised that it was not a good display for me. Because 500 nits is what is being used most of the time and to get above that you have to use HDR content. It says it on the tech specs: SDR brightness: 500 nits. So if you aren't working in video, the benefit of the XDR display is questionable.
Now to answer why it is less bright than the 5k display at the same brightness, even though they are both 500 nits... When I saw it in person, I noticed this too. The reason is there are so many more layers in the XDR display compared to the 5k display (e.g. color transformation sheet, Micro-lens array) that makes it look less clear with a slight cloudiness to it.
In the end I cancelled my order and got an iMac Pro because it was a better display for my use cases and a quieter machine.
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Yeah, I wish I would've compared it in the store... don't get me wrong, amazing monitor, perfect size, but 1600 nits should be 1600 nits with the whitest of whites!