This was ordered this morning. It is my third Studio Display since they were released. I ordered one on launch day, a second last year to be used alongside it, and today, I’ve ordered my third — this time Nano-texture.
I don’t love the graininess of the nano-texture screen, but I design a lot of dark mode stuff these days, and the reflections in my studio drive me insane when I’m working on them. I have nano-texture on my MacBook Pro, and it’s so great there, and so much easier to use for dark mode work that I end up double checking my contrast levels with that display as a reference. So it made sense to at least try a nano-texture screen on my desk too.
I figure a two week trial is enough to see how this goes. It’s going to live right beside a glossy Studio Display, so I’ll be doing direct comparisons. I’ve never read a comparison that has satisfied me, so I’m hoping 14 days of direct experience might actually give me some closure.
I will keep you all posted.
As far as the glossy display it’s replacing, I’m going to see if my wife can use it in her office. The plot twist there is that she’d use it with a work-issued Dell laptop. So we’ll see how it goes with Windows.
I’d be curious about your experience, my study config results in a large window behind me, meaning glare on the screen I have.
This means I have to keep the blinds closed and turn the lights on. Not something that really makes sense.
I need to change between my MacBook Pro and work provided Lenovo (this is a recent new job for me, I’m hating Windows 11 more than I thought I would). So would be interested to see how that goes also.
I have a similar setup to SteveMac and am kinda regretting not getting the nanotexture option. I did later get that for my iPad Pro and it sure is nice.
(Not sure if the two treatments with the same name are identical across both products though.)
If it’s got AMD inside, it’ll probably be fine. I use mine as my work laptop screen, a ThinkPad, when working from home. I used to have an HP with Intel and their integrated graphics is pathetic in comparison. It would not even light up the SD.
The one twist is Windows’ support of “high dpi”. It sucks. Your wife will most likely want 200% scaling on the SD, or everything will be tiny. If she doesn’t use the laptop screen as well, it’ll be fine. If she does, then it gets stupid.
Generally speaking, when an app opens, it’ll open using the resolution of the screen it starts on. This may look tragically bad if dragged to the other screen. This includes Microsoft’s own apps. I get around it by using the laptop screen exclusively for Teams. Everything else goes on the SD.
At work I have a 32" screen with exactly half the pixel dimensions of the SD, so it works well for me to have the same setup at work and home. Logically speaking.
Oh, and I hope she can manage with the brightness at a single setting. You have to plug in a Mac to change it.
I currently use a 10+ years old (refurbished) 27” Dell monitor that is slowly dying and would like to replace it with a Studio Display once it does stop working. However, I do have to use a Lenovo T14 laptop from work on the monitor when I work at home.
I’ve used both (and still have the glossy). My experience was that if glare is an issue then the slight nano texture blur is well worth it, and if glare is not an issue then the laser-printing sharpness of the glossy screen is amazing.
Recently I’ve had reason to outfit a work space on the other side of the country and there was no way that I could afford another pair of Studio Displays on top of everything else, so I opted for the Asus ProArt 5K monitor. It has a matte finish on the screen but it’s a surprisingly good compromise between Apple’s nano texture and gloss.
The two treatments are not the same. The Studio Display and Pro Display XDR have physically etched displays. The nano-texture treatment on the iPad and MBP are chemically etched.
I use the nano-texture on the MBP and it is a game changer. Given the option, I would pick a chemically etched nano-texture display every time. It’s very nice. I am eager to try the older studio display’s texture to see.
I do not have a window behind me, full disclosure. But I do have five or six guitars hanging on the wall behind me. The light from my small window bounces off the metal on the guitars and creates a lot of reflections from mid morning till late afternoon through most of the year. I can’t really use dark mode at all, and discerning contrast is a problem, both of which are problems for my work, which involves UI design. Without the guitars, on the other hand, there are almost no reflections at all.
In every environment I have tried, including the sun directly behind me on a summer day at a patio, the nano-texture display on my MacBook Pro makes it so I might as well be using my computer in a light-controlled environment. And with no glossy screen to compare it to directly, I do not perceive any actual loss in resolution. (More on that in a future post, when I’m not typing on my phone.) So my expectations are pretty high for the nano-texture Studio Display. I would suspect those with windows behind them should consider it a no-brainer upgrade, regardless of my conclusions.
My wife played with the Studio Display and her Dell this weekend. So far, everything works fine except the afore-mentioned brightness controls. We’ll see how it goes as she puts it through its paces during normal working hours.
I hope that the experience goes well. I recently upgraded from M1 to M4 macbook pro with nano texture display, primarily do coding work. The elimination of glare has really improved my experience over the glossy M1 display.
I don’t do any graphical work where I care about color accuracy or what every pixel looks like, so nano text works great for me.
The nano-texture Studio Display is not here yet. However, I have an update regarding my wife’s use of the Windows machine and the 5K display.
Whatever work-issued Dell laptop they give her is not powerful enough to run Excel, Teams, Word, and Chrome all day alongside the display. Her fan screams like a jet engine and her machine has just dropped its internet connection during calls, lagged, or otherwise created problems during meetings that have resulted with multiple “sorry, it’s my monitor.”
So the verdict: she liked the size (although found it felt too close to her face, which is a desk problem, not a monitor problem), loved the sharpness, wishes her machine could run it, but can’t use it.
Outside of adjusting brightness, everything else worked over just the one USB-C cable, as predicted. You could even run it at its own resolution if you set the display up to Extend (rather than Duplicate) in Control Panel.
Below you will see what I’m used to on the right (honestly not as bad as normal, because it’s off-angle), and the new monitor on the left. (Pardon the dust on the Studio Display; it’s not as bad as it looks in the picture. But it is basically dusting and vacuuming day in our household, so it checks out.)
The first thing I have noticed is that the new display has a warmer cast than the other Studio Display I’m looking at. I recall the same thing to be true for the first Studio Display I got when they were released, as well as the refurb glossy model I ordered as a second display last year. They seem to have mellowed out over time. Or I just got used to them. But they definitely run a little warmer than I’m used to.
This display is also dimmer than my previous Studio Displays.
It just got off a 50 degree Celsius truck, so maybe it’s the heat and it’ll be a little different tomorrow once it’s not melting.
I’ve had almost a full working day with the new nano-texture model now. I have several notes:
The reduction in glare is incredible, like the laptop. I have no glare on my machine anymore.
It is a little “hazy” by comparison to the glossy display. I don’t find it to be too much so, unlike many people. My experience with the laptop makes me think the level of haziness and fuzziness may depend on how much light the screen is scattering: the brighter and more reflective the environment, the more light is scattered by the texture, and the more obvious that texture becomes. In my studio, the texture is visible, but I don’t personally find it bothersome. If you are very senstive to this (and I usually am!), then it might drive you insane. It doesn’t bother me that much here.
On the other hand, the chemically etched nano-texture on the laptop is obviously, visibly better than the physically etched nano-texture on the Studio Display.
My wife, who is not a colorist or a designer or anything, sat down try to the display last night and dragged a couple windows around. She is used to my studio’s lighting conditions. She immediately looked at the remaining glossy monitor and said “get rid of this thing; the glare is super obvious and annoying now that the glare is gone from this one.” (I’ll remind you here that this is my livelihood, which means the cost of hardware is unimportant compared to the benefit to my income, so she doesn’t say this to be frivolous. Just to be practical.)
The new nano-texture display has a warm, yellow cast compared to the glossy one on its right. I have ordered a colorimeter to calibrate them both. The nano-texture one is absolutely not right. The glossy one is probably also slightly too blue, but it’s less wrong than the nano-texture display. This is all visually obvious to me to my naked eye. My wife, on the other hand, cannot tell the difference, so your mileage may vary.
The white point on the nano-texture model is lower. I would not have noticed were they not side by side. I suspect that it’s because the nano-texture refracts light hitting the display, and light from the display itself. I can’t imagine it otherwise. It has to be a two-way street. This is the biggest reason the laptops, with chemical finishes, are easier on the eyes: the white point is less affected by the chemical nano-texture than it is by the physical nano-texture. (I have no scientific proof of this, just a gut feeling.)
My plan going forward is: once the colorimeter arrives, see if I can get the displays to match. If I can’t get them to match, I might have to return this nano-texture display, order another one, and play the panel lottery game a bit. I like the nano-texture a lot, but I would upgrade in a heartbeat for a higher white point and/or a chemically-etched display like the laptop, and I need my two displays to match side by side.
My worst case scenario is ordering two nano-texture displays simultaneously to ensure I get them from the same batch and increase my chances of them sharing lottery tickets.
(Final note: my wife was shocked I didn’t have a colorimeter hanging around somewhere. “You mean you’ve been a freelance designer for over a decade and you never checked your monitor colours?” I mean… yeah. Apple’s have been very consistent, and very accurate to my friends’ calibrated monitors (in my experience), since 2012. It’s only this week that it’s ever been a problem for me!)
Great observations. It’s really interesting to hear about the trade offs.
Speaking of colorimeters, and your comment about the accuracy of Apple displays, would you recommend a colorimeter for an amateur photographer looking to get into (lab) printing?
I’ve also considered whether I can or should try to match my SD with my MBP. While I tend to edit on the larger screen, I do have occasion to edit on the laptop sometimes. I did, at least, switch off the retina wrecking 1600 nit mode on the laptop.
Colorimeter arrived. I have calibrated everything. The nano-texture display was about 50k too warm, and the glossy displays were each about 100k to cool. I know I’m very sensitive to colour in a way most people are not, but sometimes I surprise myself.
Perceptually, the nano-texture still looks warmer to me, even though the studios are within 10k of each other now. I suspect this is because of the way my office lighting is scattered by the nano-texture finish. I might push this display to D66 (instead of D65) to see if that gets it a little perceptually closer. But now I just have to decide if I’m willing to take the perceptual resolution hit on this monitor, because it looks less sharp than the glossy Studio Display. I would still upgrade to next year’s rumoured new monitor if the nano-texture finish was updated to be more like the MacBook Pro’s.
@zkarj Much of the answer here is dependent on your eyes’ ability to see the difference, and whether or not you are surprised by your photo prints. Try printing a photo and see if the difference surprises you. If it does not, I’d say you’re fine.
I will be returning the nano-texture Studio Display.
Long story short: the nano-texture on the SD gives me a headache. This is not true for the nano-texture on the MBP, which I genuinely don’t even notice in day to day use.
YMMV if you try one for yourself. It completely eliminates reflections, and that’s nice. It does affect contrast, but in a way that mostly makes you hyper-aware of low-contrast designs (which is honestly a perk in my line of work). But the haze is real.
My critical mistake is pairing it with my glossy Studio Display. I’m used to two displays, and it would have been smarter to order two nano-texture Studio Displays instead of doing one at a time. If I did that, though, I’d spend $6k CAD on displays, and I’d still get headaches.
I also know I’d upgrade to a better nano-texture display (hopefully more in line with the quality of the nano-texture on the MBP) in a heartbeat, should they become available next year. So then I’d be out $12k in less than 12 months on displays alone. I run a profitable business, but even I have a limit on what I care to spend on monitors.
As much as I loved not seeing glare, I had to swap the nano-texture display out for my other glossy display at 3pm today to keep working. And the glossy display was a relief for my eyes. That’s when I knew the jig was up.
Thanks a lot, it was very interesting to read a detailed account of your findings. Sure removed any FOMO I had in not choosing the nano-texture option on my Studio Display.
Guess you will need to find a new location for those beautiful guitars then?
There’s not really another suitable space for the guitars in our house. I’m just hoping for an updated Studio Display 2 with better nano-texture. Until then, I will live, and I will occasionally complain.
