24 Scientific American, September 2019VENTURES
THE BUSINESS OF INNOVATIONWade Roush is the host and producer of Soonish, a podcast
about technology, culture, curiosity and the future. He
is a co-founder of the podcast collective Hub & Spoke and
a freelance reporter for print, online and radio outlets,
such as MIT Technology Review, Xconomy, WBUR and WHYY.Illustration by Jay BendtApple’s Amazing
New Screen
It will revamp our ideas of what
a display can do
By Wade Roush“The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the
medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by
nature but by historical circumstances,” German cultural critic
Walter Benjamin wrote in 1935. We see the world, he was saying,
as if on a screen constructed by everyone who came before us.
Speaking of screens: Tucked into the product announcements
at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June was a new
piece of gear that set hearts aflame among photographers, film
editors and designers. It’s a new Apple-built LCD screen, the Pro
Display XDR, intended as the companion to Apple’s new high-end
Mac Pro. (They’re both expected to be available this fall.)
I got a close-up look, and everything about it is eye-popping: its
resolution (6,016 by 3,384 pixels, or “6K”); brightness (peaking at
about 30 times brighter than a movie screen and two to three
times brighter than an average television); and contrast ratio
(1,000,000:1—like a piece of white paper in sunlight as compared
with the same paper in moonlight). And of course, its $4,999 price
tag, which puts it squarely in the professional market.
But here’s why you should care, even if your job doesn’t depend
on being able to see every last detail of the documentary you’re
shooting in 4K digital video. In a world of mass-produced images,
technology sets our visual expectations, as Benjamin would have
understood. Photography forced painters away from literal rep-
resentations and toward impressionism and abstraction. Movies
made photography look static. Color film made the black-and-
white past look antique. High-definition TV made standard defi-
nition look grainy. And recent innovations, such as high dy namic
range (HDR) photography and videography, can make older pic-
tures seem flat and lifeless. Now along comes Apple, touting a
screen so contrasty that the company decided the term “HDR”
was insufficient—XDR stands for “extreme dynamic range.”
Despite the name, though, providing greater dynamic range
isn’t just about showing deep blacks or vivid whites. It’s about
revealing more of the subtle detail often lost in light and shadows.
In short, HDR imaging tries to depict the world the way the hu -
man eye can see it. Up to now, professionals needed reference
monitors priced in the tens of thousands of dollars to experience
graphics and video in their full HDR glory. Apple, as it has done
before with high-pixel-count “retina” screens, is nudging this tech-
nology into the realm where it might be affordable to inde pendent
filmmakers, small design studios, radiology practices or science
laboratories—anyone for whom details and fidelity count.
Apple reached deep into its bag of tricks to make the Pro Dis-
play work. For one thing, the screen is illuminated by an array of
576 blue LEDs rather than the strips of white LEDs around the
borders of traditional displays. Because blue light can be emitted
by a single chip, it can be controlled more precisely than white
light, according to Vincent Gu, the Apple display engineer who
leads one of the teams behind the project. The blue light hits a
color-correction sheet and “goes through a quantum physics
transformation” that converts it into wide-spectrum light, he says.
And the display itself is a computer. A new timing controller
modulates not just the LCD pixels but the light sources behind
them—analyzing content and turning the LEDs all the way off
in places where the image should be black, for example. “The algo-
rithm inside of that timing controller is harmoniously or -
chestrating all this,” Gu says. “We’re doing a lot of heavy com-
putation. But we do not manipulate what the user intended.”
Colleen Novielli, part of the Mac marketing team, says Apple’s
goal is to help video editors, photographers, 3-D animators, and
others understand precisely how their work will look once it
reaches end users on a movie screen or a printed page. “Everyone
will be able to truly do their best work because they can see what
they’re supposed to be seeing,” Novielli told me.
But given the pace of change in the electronics industry, it
seems likely that similar technology will inevitably filter down to
the consumer level, perhaps changing what we all expect. As Ben-
jamin marveled, “The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply
render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear:
it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.” In the
screen is our new reality.JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE
Visit 2_w²í_Ĉ¬wÞ_C² on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]