When iMac was released to the public a few years ago, many thought that it will be replaced by a more profit-hugging gadget that Apple will someday develop. They couldn't be more wrong.
In customary defiance of industry trends, Apple set fresh Mac sales records by selling 20.6 million machines over the last fiscal year. This upward demand trend means only one thing, Apple is focused on constantly enhancing its products, rather than treating them as low value commodity items. The following observation support this notion.
P3
Apple decided to use a digital cinema industry color standard called DCI P3 (Apple calls this P3) in the new iMac. Originally developed for use in digital cinemas, the standard - which Apple calls P3 - meant movies would look more realistic (blacker blacks and more vivid colors - the red of a London bus is the kind of color users will see using P3 displays). Apple’s decision to adopt the standard means iMacs provide a 25 percent larger color space than one could get from standard sRGB-based displays.
White
Panels have forever been lit by white lamps/LEDs, but the white causes problems when reproducing some colors. To get round this Apple developed advanced red-green phosphor LEDs that enable the iMacs to display a much wider range of red, green and blue for better results. This means the new iMac displays are capable of displaying 99 percent of the P3 colour space, according to Apple.
Gamut
"We’ve given these a wider color gamut. Basically means they have a bigger palette of colors they can display," Apple’s Senior Director for Mac Hardware Tom Boger told Medium. The Retina displays deliver 100 percent sRGB – most other displays only manage 90 percent or less.
Timing
Most displays are driven by two timing controllers, one for the left the other for the right of the screen. Apple wanted to deliver a more consistent experience, but even the most powerful timing controllers were unable to manage the number of pixels on the 4K and 5L iMac displays. Apple’s solution was to design its own timing controller capable of handling 14.7 million pixels at once.
RAW
The 5K display can show 14.7-megapixel photos at native resolution with a 218ppi pixel density. What does this mean? It means photos can be viewed and altered one megapixel at a time for the best possible final image quality. While images previously converted to lossy image formats such as JPEG won’t benefit too much from improved screen resolution, any images users happen to have around at full-res will deliver much wider color accuracy than they have seen before.
Contrast
To make contrast better Apple developed a process called photo alignment. This uses UV light to ensure each molecule on the TFT used in the display lies uniformly on the display, so image contrast appears correct.
Calibration
Apple puts each newly manufactured Mac through a color calibration process to ensure the colors are exact and meet recognized standards. At its simplest this means that if users display the same image on a line of 100+ newly manufactured iMacs, the picture will appear identical on each one.
In customary defiance of industry trends, Apple set fresh Mac sales records by selling 20.6 million machines over the last fiscal year. This upward demand trend means only one thing, Apple is focused on constantly enhancing its products, rather than treating them as low value commodity items. The following observation support this notion.
P3
Apple decided to use a digital cinema industry color standard called DCI P3 (Apple calls this P3) in the new iMac. Originally developed for use in digital cinemas, the standard - which Apple calls P3 - meant movies would look more realistic (blacker blacks and more vivid colors - the red of a London bus is the kind of color users will see using P3 displays). Apple’s decision to adopt the standard means iMacs provide a 25 percent larger color space than one could get from standard sRGB-based displays.
White
Panels have forever been lit by white lamps/LEDs, but the white causes problems when reproducing some colors. To get round this Apple developed advanced red-green phosphor LEDs that enable the iMacs to display a much wider range of red, green and blue for better results. This means the new iMac displays are capable of displaying 99 percent of the P3 colour space, according to Apple.
Gamut
"We’ve given these a wider color gamut. Basically means they have a bigger palette of colors they can display," Apple’s Senior Director for Mac Hardware Tom Boger told Medium. The Retina displays deliver 100 percent sRGB – most other displays only manage 90 percent or less.
Timing
Most displays are driven by two timing controllers, one for the left the other for the right of the screen. Apple wanted to deliver a more consistent experience, but even the most powerful timing controllers were unable to manage the number of pixels on the 4K and 5L iMac displays. Apple’s solution was to design its own timing controller capable of handling 14.7 million pixels at once.
RAW
The 5K display can show 14.7-megapixel photos at native resolution with a 218ppi pixel density. What does this mean? It means photos can be viewed and altered one megapixel at a time for the best possible final image quality. While images previously converted to lossy image formats such as JPEG won’t benefit too much from improved screen resolution, any images users happen to have around at full-res will deliver much wider color accuracy than they have seen before.
Contrast
To make contrast better Apple developed a process called photo alignment. This uses UV light to ensure each molecule on the TFT used in the display lies uniformly on the display, so image contrast appears correct.
Calibration
Apple puts each newly manufactured Mac through a color calibration process to ensure the colors are exact and meet recognized standards. At its simplest this means that if users display the same image on a line of 100+ newly manufactured iMacs, the picture will appear identical on each one.
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