The XDR Monitor is Likely Not Meant for You
When Apple’s $5,000 XDR monitor was announced there was an audible gasp from everyone in the audience. It was clear, despite frequent criticism of Apple’s pricing practices, that this price point was appalling. I don’t think Apple’s business analysts could have missed the mark this much in pricing this monitor so it begs the question, who is this for?
Before the dominance of the iPhone era, Apple’s “pro” moniker was less of a branding statement and more of a hardware differentiator. Software was built specifically for Apple products, font rendering was more elegant, color management was easier, and there are obvious efficiency gains in standardized hardware for production companies. It wasn’t until recently that the gap between Apple and PC became essentially insignificant.
While Apple’s computers today have largely lost in a pure hardware to price comparison, their displays are still some of the most well built and beautiful to date. The 2015 Macbook Pro Retina, still outperforms comparable laptop displays with it’s, at the time insane, 227 pixels per inch density, 300 nits of brightness, and 900:1 contrast ratio. It’s hard to find laptop manufactures putting that much effort towards display engineering, with some of the closest competitors still lacking in good color reproduction. So despite the deserved criticism from Apple critics, Apple’s displays are a good enough reason in themselves to purchase a MacBook.
If the XDR performs as well in real world usages as the specifications say, then it too will be justified in its price. While Apple’s marketing and product pages show it being used for various tasks like writing code or video editing, I think this monitor will truly excel at tasks such as color grading, video analysis, and QA task for ensuring films stick to guidelines for Netflix or HBO or the big screen. Comparing the XDR to more industry standard reference monitors is where its value becomes more slighty apparent. The cheapest ones are nearly half the size and others lack true 6k resolution. A quick browse on BHPhoto shows that similarly spec-ed monitors are roughly $30,000. That said, these monitors have a suite of more useful reference tools, viewing LUT options, multi-camera monitoring, and other various in-monitor processing that can occur on or off set.
So what is the XDR meant for? I think, given Apples consistency with color reproduction in their displays, these monitors will be used to ensure the entire production team is looking at the exact same thing. Ideally, this would speed up production and create more confidence in the creative decisions that are being made.
Between pre-editors and assistant editors and editor editors, there’s generally a lot of hands on the footage we see on the screen. Buying monitors and calibrating them to make sure everyone is seeing the same image becomes expensive and tedious. At one of my first jobs, my art director had someone coming in every day for a week to calibrate her new LG monitor. The magentas were a little too saturated and despite the unabated effort from our entire tech team, the issue was never really fixed. Cross checking her work on my monitor slowed production for the both of us, but it was a necessary evil to ensure the quality of our work. If the XDR monitor can remove these problems from production workflows, able to be implemented directly when it’s unpacked, then the efficiency gains could be huge for productions.
Spending $5,000 on a new monitor is a big bite for most consumers. It’s hard to justify this monitor as a necessity even for those at the prosumer photo and video level. There are much better options that provide significantly more value. Something like the LG Ultrawide that has received great acclaim from many in the video editing world, or even the budget AOC QHD for lighter tasks like photo editing or illustration.
At the end of the day, the content of your stories matter much more than the precision of color accuracy in the shadows of your 4k footage. Gear is always there to help augment the story, but it should never become the core of what you’re presenting.
