Monitor brightness

[pbourget]

I have a 27 inch iMac Pro and the specs says it has a brightness of 500 nits. I look at the new Apple Studio display and it is spec’d at 600 nits and the Pro display is 1600 nits.

When I calibrate my monitor it always is set to a lower brightness than I would use if I didn’t know to calibrate it. Since you don’t calibrate a monitor to be real bright for photo printing do the specs really matter? I do print my own photos and am generally happy with the results.

Peter

[Manfred M]

The simple answer is most of the Mac market is for use in an office type environment where you need a lot of brightness due to the intensity of ambient light conditions, so that is what these displays are aimed at.

As long as you can turn them down to the 80 - 120 candela / square meter output that is usually recommended for photo editing, you should be fine.

My main beef with the latest Apple displays is that they use the DCI-P3 colour space, which is what the gamut of digital cinema projector bulbs. This colour space can handle more saturated yellows that sRGB. Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB. It doesn't help photographers as these yellows are out of gamut for colour inkjet photo printers. 100% Adobe RGB would be more suitable for photographer...

[pbourget]

Thanks Manfred,
I always set mine to 120 during calibration so I felt the overall specs for nits was unimportant but wanted to be sure. I also have a second monitor, a BenQ SW271 which I don't calibrate as I don't use it for photos. I'll have to calibrate it and see if Apple will let me set it to Adobe RGB as it says it is 99% Adobe RGB. Then I could see which monitor gives me the best display to match my printer, Canon Pro-100. Since my primary (iMac) monitor is DCI-P3 I may be stuck with that on the BenQ.

[Manfred M]

Peter - there are a lot of Mac users that use the Apple supplied screens. They are a step up from the sRGB, but the issue from a photographic standpoint, parts of the gamut lies outside of devices (primarily ink-jet photo printers) that photographers will use.

Here is a chromacity diagram that shows the colours that lie in the sRGB, Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 RGB colour spaces. The reds and yellows cannot be reproduced by high end photo printers. On the other hand, if one is editing video for feature film production for cinema releases, the colour space is where one wants to work in. Unfortunately, for streaming or physical media that we view at home the REC709 colour space is used; it has the same chromacities as sRGB.

[Acorn]

My ancient Lenovo laptop came originally with Windows 8. It has since been upgraded to Windows 10 but its spec. will not allow a further upgrade to Windows 11. But now I can no longer adjust the screen brightness by means of F11 and F12. Microsoft reliably tell me that my laptop, due to the Windows upgradings, is no longer capable of allowing screen brightness adjustments. Amazingly it's still capable of outputting accurate colour prints.

[royent]

I too have a Lenovo laptop originally windows 8 now on windows 10. f11 and f12 still work on mine

[pbourget]

That is good to know about the printers. I am an amateur and just print for myself. Over time I have learned the little additional adjustments I need to do to get my prints to look good, now I know why I have to do those. I calibrated my BenQ monitor and it let me set it to Adobe RGB. Next time I am working on a print it will be interesting to look at the photo on both the iMac display and the BenQ and see if I can see a difference and which matches the print best. I'll look for a photo with lots of yellow in it.

[dje]

The simple answer is most of the Mac market is for use in an office type environment where you need a lot of brightness due to the intensity of ambient light conditions, so that is what these displays are aimed at.

As long as you can turn them down to the 80 - 120 candela / square meter output that is usually recommended for photo editing, you should be fine.

My main beef with the latest Apple displays is that they use the DCI-P3 colour space, which is what the gamut of digital cinema projector bulbs. This colour space can handle more saturated yellows that sRGB. Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB. It doesn't help photographers as these yellows are out of gamut for colour inkjet photo printers. 100% Adobe RGB would be more suitable for photographer...

Peter in addition to what Manfred mentions, it's also worth noting that the Mac Pro display is aimed at editing/color grading of HDR video. This is where the figure of 1600 nits comes in. It's a peak rating and is confined to a restricted area of the screen for a restricted time. It's quite a high figure (HDR video often uses 1000 nits) and I think it might give you a headache if you looked at the whole screen of this brightness for some time!

Apple seems to be very interested in the HDR video market. Current model iPhones can produce 4K 10bit HDR videos which look great if you have a 4K HDR TV or monitor.

Dave