# Apple Studio Monitor vs other monitors for photo/video editing. Thoughts? (vs. Benq, etc)



## cayenne (Jun 6, 2022)

I'm starting to look seriously soon for a new monitor.

My old, old Dell U2711 27" is fading on me, has what looks to be splotchy dim spots I can see around the display. 

I had originally been looking perhaps at one of the BENQ offerings...still trying to weed through the differences in their models.

But I happened upon the newish lower level Apple "studio" monitor...it is 27" and looks pretty good.

I'd originally been thinking to increase my size upwards from 27", since my eyesight isn't getting any better, but I could compromise quality over quantity if it came down to it.

Does anyone have experience with the new Apple monitors?

They have that other monster one, but I don't think I want to drop $5K on their top of the line 32" monitor......oh, I'd like to, but don't have the extra contractor money coming in for that right now.

Anyway, I really respect the opinions of folks on here....we all know the importance of a good quality monitor for editing here, so wondering if anyone had experience with the new Apple monitors.

Thank you in advance,

cayenne


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## Deleted member 381342 (Jun 6, 2022)

It is a really fantastic monitor and out the box profiles were well matched with my Canon Imagegraph Pro 300. Text is lovely and sharp. I wouldn’t say it is up to task for colour grading video, and there are better/cheaper options for games, but out the box it does everything very well and has been fantastic for photo editing.

Is there anything in particular you want to know about it?


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## koenkooi (Jun 7, 2022)

I’m very happy with mine, especially the 3 10gbit/s usb ports on the back. It’s slightly better than my old iMac display in every metric, which is why I bought it. 

Keep in mind that it works best with Apple computers, if you’re going to use it with a non-Apple computer a lot of features won’t work.


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## cayenne (Jun 7, 2022)

koenkooi said:


> I’m very happy with mine, especially the 3 10gbit/s usb ports on the back. It’s slightly better than my old iMac display in every metric, which is why I bought it.
> 
> Keep in mind that it works best with Apple computers, if you’re going to use it with a non-Apple computer a lot of features won’t work.


I've got a Mac Pro....so, it should work well with my computer.

Ugh, I just really wanted a bit larger than 27" this time around.

Those extra ports on back are a boon tho!!

Thank you for your reply!!

C


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## cayenne (Jun 7, 2022)

Photo Bunny said:


> It is a really fantastic monitor and out the box profiles were well matched with my Canon Imagegraph Pro 300. Text is lovely and sharp. I wouldn’t say it is up to task for colour grading video, and there are better/cheaper options for games, but out the box it does everything very well and has been fantastic for photo editing.
> 
> Is there anything in particular you want to know about it?


Thank you for the reply!!

Hmm...if it is good enough for color on stills I would think it would be good enough for color grading videos too?

Do keep in mind, I'm not doing either for a living at this time...the videos are just for my YouTube output, etc....I do want quality and spend time on it, but it isn't affecting my bank account.

I have the tools to calibrate it too.....

Let me ask, did you get one with the stand or VESA mount? I'm contemplating the VESA mount as that my current display in on an arm allowing me to move it to where I need it and keep more of my desktop free....etc.

Thanks in advance!!

c


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## Deleted member 381342 (Jun 7, 2022)

cayenne said:


> Thank you for the reply!!
> 
> Hmm...if it is good enough for color on stills I would think it would be good enough for color grading videos too?
> 
> ...


My home one is the bog standard stand. The ones we have at work are VESA mount. You can take it into the Apple store and get the mount changed after purchase and if I had multiple at home I would do that. 

When I say colour work I am specifically meaning colour grading a HDR Hollywood movie. It isn’t a grading monitor and it also isn’t £5000 or even £40,000. For photo work I haven’t needed to calibrate it, it came out the box almost perfectly matched to my printer and the colours and contrast are fantastic. 

Which Mac Pro do you have? This won’t run on the 2010 nor 2013. You’ll need a 2019 Mac Pro at least. I run it from a Studio Max and Studio Ultras, though it was quite happy running on the M1 Mac Mini too. 

One of the great things with Apple is they have so many physical stores, you could go give it a wee nose in person ?


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## john1970 (Jun 7, 2022)

I have used BENQ and NEC monitors with Mac mini computers for several years without any issues. I have never purchased an apple monitor due to their cost.


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## stevelee (Jun 7, 2022)

My old Mac is an early 5K iMac. I recently bought a Mac Studio with the M1 Max, 64GB RAM, and 2 TB SSD. My iMac was so well tricked out that I needed to upgrade the new one to beat its specs. A slight consideration is that the RAM is also used by the GPU et. al. In addition to the CPU, and on my iMac the GPU has its own memory.

I ordered the new Studio Monitor, and it arrived several weeks before the Mac, because of the upgrades. So I used an adaptor to let the new monitor be a second one for the iMac. Hooked up that way, it supported just 4k, but still looked really good. Now with the new Mac, it has its 5K splendor, and looks great. I’ve not done any video with it yet. A 5K monitor gives Final Cut Pro plenty of real estate for editing 4K movies. The Apple monitor costs more than a lot of others, but I didn’t find anything that came close that would save more than a couple hundred dollars. I didn’t think that was worth what you give up. 

I’m still using the iMac to help me retrieve passwords and settings that didn’t transfer over, so it is set up beside the new monitor still. Once I get done with that, I will likely either adapt the old 23” monitor from my 2006 Mac Pro or buy something like a 4K Dell. I got spoiled using a second monitor for those few weeks. Until I got the iMac, I always used dual monitors, but with 5K never much felt the need. And I was still using the old Mac Pro for audio sampling while I was doing other things on the iMac. My annual (except for the last three years) main video project is coming up next week. The lighting is has been changed, so maybe I won’t have the color grading issues I used to have. I never got good with color grading in FCP, and in desperation sometimes used Premiere. Otherwise, I am just so much more familiar with working in FCP that it is usually not worth it. In any event, I expect my new system to be more than up to the task.


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## cayenne (Jun 8, 2022)

Photo Bunny said:


> My home one is the bog standard stand. The ones we have at work are VESA mount. You can take it into the Apple store and get the mount changed after purchase and if I had multiple at home I would do that.
> 
> When I say colour work I am specifically meaning colour grading a HDR Hollywood movie. It isn’t a grading monitor and it also isn’t £5000 or even £40,000. For photo work I haven’t needed to calibrate it, it came out the box almost perfectly matched to my printer and the colours and contrast are fantastic.
> 
> ...


It's the newer one....just a year or so before they announced the switch to Mac silicon....

Man, I hope they come out with a way to upgrade mine with the new chip...board replacement, or something....

But it's still a monster for now....


C


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## cayenne (Jun 8, 2022)

stevelee said:


> My old Mac is an early 5K iMac. I recently bought a Mac Studio with the M1 Max, 64GB RAM, and 2 TB SSD. My iMac was so well tricked out that I needed to upgrade the new one to beat its specs. A slight consideration is that the RAM is also used by the GPU et. al. In addition to the CPU, and on my iMac the GPU has its own memory.
> 
> I ordered the new Studio Monitor, and it arrived several weeks before the Mac, because of the upgrades. So I used an adaptor to let the new monitor be a second one for the iMac. Hooked up that way, it supported just 4k, but still looked really good. Now with the new Mac, it has its 5K splendor, and looks great. I’ve not done any video with it yet. A 5K monitor gives Final Cut Pro plenty of real estate for editing 4K movies. The Apple monitor costs more than a lot of others, but I didn’t find anything that came close that would save more than a couple hundred dollars. I didn’t think that was worth what you give up.
> 
> I’m still using the iMac to help me retrieve passwords and settings that didn’t transfer over, so it is set up beside the new monitor still. Once I get done with that, I will likely either adapt the old 23” monitor from my 2006 Mac Pro or buy something like a 4K Dell. I got spoiled using a second monitor for those few weeks. Until I got the iMac, I always used dual monitors, but with 5K never much felt the need. And I was still using the old Mac Pro for audio sampling while I was doing other things on the iMac. My annual (except for the last three years) main video project is coming up next week. The lighting is has been changed, so maybe I won’t have the color grading issues I used to have. I never got good with color grading in FCP, and in desperation sometimes used Premiere. Otherwise, I am just so much more familiar with working in FCP that it is usually not worth it. In any event, I expect my new system to be more than up to the task.


I like FCPX....but I think for my next project, I'm gonna download and try to fully edit and color it with Davinci Resolve.

I played with older versions for color grading and really liked it....but have never really edited on it. The old roundtripping between FCPX and Resolve was a PITA, so thought it would be a fun learning experience to try it full from start to publish with Resolve.

C


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## stevelee (Jun 9, 2022)

cayenne said:


> It's the newer one....just a year or so before they announced the switch to Mac silicon....
> 
> Man, I hope they come out with a way to upgrade mine with the new chip...board replacement, or something....
> 
> ...


My 2014 iMac is still rather fast on almost everything; i7 4Mhz quad, so it should be fast. It doesn’t stumble editing 4K video. Compressor chews through short videos in a minute or two. Your Mac should be supported by OS versions for six or eight years. I wouldn’t sweat it. So far I can’t tell any slowdown on old software running under Rosetta. Photoshop under Rosetta seemed as fast as on Intel in my iMac. I had to deinstall Photoshop and reinstall to get the Universal version that runs natively. Adobe made that a quick and easy process. All the rest of the Adobe apps made the transition without problems.

I may have reported this somewhere else here. For fun I ran a speed test in Compressor on both Macs. Compressor logs the time and is processor intensive, so it seemed like a good choice for an easy comparison. So I took a 1.4 GB .mov file and set up Compressor on both computers to process it in batch to a regular .m4v file and to an HEVC encoded one.

The new Mac took 2 minutes and 25 seconds to do both encodings.

When I went on to bed, the old iMac was chugging away on all four cores, and the fan kicked on to deal with overheating.

In the morning I checked, and the iMac did the regular encoding in 1 minute 54 seconds, as opposed to the 1 minute 16 seconds it took for the new Mac Studio, so not even twice as fast.

But the HEVC was a different story. The Studio took 1 minute and 9 seconds. The iMac took 1 hour 35 minutes 4 seconds! Hmmm. So I checked. It was not a fair comparison. The studio has built-in HEVC hardware processing, among other things. So I can see why video pros would find it useful. I did check the videos, and they both came out well on both computers.

So if you are doing HEVC conversions, you probably want a new Mac. If not, then you may not need to hurry.


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## stevelee (Jun 9, 2022)

cayenne said:


> I like FCPX....but I think for my next project, I'm gonna download and try to fully edit and color it with Davinci Resolve.
> 
> I played with older versions for color grading and really liked it....but have never really edited on it. The old roundtripping between FCPX and Resolve was a PITA, so thought it would be a fun learning experience to try it full from start to publish with Resolve.
> 
> C


It has been a while since I tried Premiere, so I don’t recall specifics. I think I felt more at home with it for color since I do color correction in other Adobe apps.

What I don’t do well with in FCPX is the interface that is like the new one in ACR and Lightroom that replaced split toning. I don’t do any better with it there. I think it is some kind on industry standard, so I know the fault is just with me. I found the old split toning did a great job helping me remove casts from scans of old color slides.

The video in question is shot in an arena with mostly empty red seats facing me. So to deal with the sea of red, auto temperature will probably still add a cyan cast even without the funky old lights.


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