Apple Studio Display — why artists love it and reviewers hate it

Adam, I said great to have you on. You did a video on Apple Studio Display and I was

thinking that maybe you could just run us through why you bought it, why you love it

because I think inherent in that conversation, you're going to highlight a lot of stuff that

I think I didn't really think of when I was looking at the Studio Display and I think

that's because I wasn't looking at why the Studio Display is useful. I was just looking

at the spec sheets and the spec sheets are kind of disappointing for the price

Yeah, they are subjectively, subjectively like, yeah, you can kind of get the equivalent

for a ton cheaper. Now I personally have, I've worked with many different types of displays

for artists and stuff like that and the thing that really drew me in was the experiences

I had had with many other displays that were really good for certain types of visual production

like photography and stuff like that or people who are involved in print. But my biggest

gripe and I work on like a $4,500 pen display right over here, like I work with expensive

displays and stuff like that all the time. Calibration has always been my rub. It's always

been my really big fuss and every two weeks I'm recalibrating because I'm doing fine tuning

colors and fine tuned values and things like that and details as well. And, you know, I'd

spend a couple of weeks working on a painting and then I go and I look at it on my phone

and I go, that's not what I painted. The values are off, the colors have shifted, warmer

cooler, there's a lot more, usually the contrast would be, the blacks would be too black and

I'd lose a lot of the details and the lower values. So I'd end up having to kind of bluff

it by going back into Photoshop or going back into a video production, a video app

or whatever and tweaking it and then going back and forth and saving it and checking

to see if I could get the colors to work properly. And however, I loved the colors that I would

get on my iPad, for instance, you know, but I hated painting on an iPad. I'm not a big

fan of doing artwork on the iPad, but I love the colors. And I always thought to myself

if I could get a display, an Apple display, where I get perfectly matched colors between

my iPad, my iPhone, my desktop display and everything like that or my MacBook or whatever

that would be the ideal situation. But of course, then the Pro Display came out. And

I went, oh! A display by Apple! And then the price tag came out and I went, screw this

I flipped my desk and I walked out of the room and I just got frustrated with that fact and I went, okay, well forget it, you know, there's no way I'm going to spend that kind

of money on it. And despite it being really pretty and blah, blah, blah, I really didn't

feel it was for, you know, maybe like the high-end graphic design studios might be able

to afford something like that. But it wasn't a consumer product in that regard. So when

the studio displays came out, for the price that they did, and you know, people would

spit out their coffee when they'd see a price tag that's over $2,000 Canadian, right? I'm

based in Canada, so I'm kind of thinking of Canadian prices. And a lot of people would spit their coffee out and I'm sitting there going, oh, okay, now we're talking! You know

a 5K display, 27 inches, which is the perfect size, especially if you want to use dual displays

32 is something I always felt was too big for two displays. I would either go with an

ultra-wide, I prefer an ultra-wide, or to go with two 27s. I think that really hits

the sweet spot there. It's 5K, cool, that's a bonus. I'm perfectly fine with 4K. But it's

the colour representation, it's the contrast, the brightness. And being able to work on

a painting on my studio display and then take it and look at it on my phone and go, that's

exactly what I painted. And have the confidence that when I'm posting my art on YouTube, that

people are getting what I intended. Because you'd be surprised how many times I'd post

a video on YouTube because I didn't double-check it somewhere else. I'd post it and then I'm

like, I just published a public video where people can barely tell what I painted halfway

through it because it was too dark. Because I do a lot of very dark, dark souls-ian type

of inspired art. And it was very frustrating for me. So since then, despite having a $4,500

plus display here, not including the stand, for all of you people who freak out over the

cost of the Pro Display prices, or the studio display stand prices, I end up working on

a cheaper desktop tablet just so I can take advantage of the studio display and paint

on that. I'd say the last 3 or 4 painting videos that I've done, I've done 80% of my

painting process on my studio display, despite having this over here, which I prefer drawing

on, physically. So that in and of itself, that has made it worth the purchase for me

because one of the displays I tested out that I love too, for what it's worth, is the BenQ

the SW321C. And it's 32-inch, 4K, big matte boxes and everything like that, very impressive

looking thing. And I can't paint on it. It's not good for digital paint. It's great for

print, but it sucks for digital painting because my art is digital. What you see is what I

see on my screen. I'm not handing you a print, I'm presenting you something on my screen

So I want to make sure I'm being faithful to that image, not the printed image. So for

the BenQ, as beautiful as it is, is no good for digital painting. So this one I really

feel is, when they called it the studio display, I felt as an artist, they're marketing this

to me. This is a product for an artist. And well, I believe in that because I've been

working on it since I got it and I absolutely love working on this thing. It's a blessing

This is what I mean, Lewis. Like all of this, you hear, he's like, this studio display

it fits into my workflow. And it makes sense for me because the thing that I heard you

say that really resonated with me is you need consistency across your displays. You need

them to look the same. And as a creator myself, that's important because you want the thing

that people see to be the thing that you see on your screen when you're creating it. And

that's the one thing that I never really considered. And you mentioned in your video

that if you wanted to pair a second monitor with your iMac, for instance, you couldn't

really ever get them to match. And so it's not really useful. But with the studio display

every display looks exactly the same. And you know that when you create something on

the studio display, it's going to look the same on an iPad. It's going to look the same on an iPhone and on a MacBook Pro. And so you know exactly what your consumer is going

to see. And that is the selling point that I really didn't ever consider, because I just

considered the price and I looked at the specs and I'm like it gets 1600 nits brightness

like that's cool. But 5k, it's the same as the iMac. You know, it has the same PPI as

the iMac. It looks like they literally just pulled the display out of the iMac and raised

the price and made a little bit bigger. And for me, that makes it not worth it. So I felt

kind of got a raw deal because the value wasn't there. But then hearing you describe it, I'm like

this actually does make a lot of sense if you need consistency. And now..

And one monitor and dual monitors. You can't do that with an iMac in an elegant way. Yeah. Right? Yeah

Because you don't have an equivalent Apple monitor to do that with. Yeah, that's to me

the big one of the biggest deals. Next to the calibration is the fact that I can work with

more than one screen, for sure. Yeah. And to your point, there's a lot of great monitors out there, but most of them are 4k

for instance. And then your Mac has to scale the OS to 4k instead of just doubling the resolution

to 5k, which is what it does with the 5k studio display monitor. So it really taxes your GPO

And I've heard people say it slows my system way down. So that's not great. And the OS isn't meant

for 4k. So your text gets blurry and weird. It does. Yeah

Right? Which is also another thing. And then the brightness isn't there. So like a lot of monitors, like you said, like that really great BenQ monitor, it's meant for print. But a lot of

print work, you have to have really low brightness. Am I right? Like 100 or 200 nits even, which is

really low. Yeah, like 200 nits max. And you want 200 nits max, and you want to make sure you're not getting

this... You want your contrasts to be very, very... You want a nice flat contrast. You don't want your

colors to be too embellished. Because if you ever take artwork, you produce artwork, and then you

want to print it out, you can waste 50 bucks worth of high quality paper trying to get the bloody

print to look good, because it comes out, the colors are completely off. So the whole getting

you know, printing proofs and getting the colors to match, and then you do like a spreadsheet with

all the different colors you got to work with, and you go, Okay, I guess that one's the closest, and that one's the closest. So when you have a print display, like the BenQ, it's even got a

print preview mode on it, which is really, really cool, because then I can, I really get a fairly

faithful idea on what that print is going to look like, because I'm probably selling them for what

it's worth, you know, if that's the type of business that I do. So I'm looking at it going, Okay, I know what's going to print, I make a couple of tweaks, it comes out of the printer

it looks great, when I don't have to reprint anything. And that printing paper is not cheap

right? You know, especially if you're doing like a big 13 by 19 print or something like that

So in that particular case, it's made for that. And a printer can never keep up with a digital

image, it just can't. The contrast ratio, the brightness, the saturation, all that kind of stuff is definitely much stronger on a display for sure