Apple Studio Display XDR Review: Too Much but Not Enough
Reducing more dimming zones is only half the equation for great HDR. You also need as much brightness and contrast as possible, and Studio Display XDR delivers an unprecedented level.
Apple claims that peak brightness can reach 2,000 nits, and when I measured it myself with my colorimeter, it peaked at 1,905 nits in a 25% window. It’s really impressive. Meanwhile, it can even do 1,701 nits at 49% and 948 nits at full screen. This is by far the brightest computer screen I have ever tested. Although contrast and color performance can’t be compared to OLED, creators working in HDR will get a lot more from Studio Display XDR. For example, I tested the Dell 32 Plus QD-OLED, which can do HDR quite well, but only maxes out at 946 nits. And that’s only within a 1 percent window.
Most of your use of Studio Display XDR will be in SDR, not HDR. There are some compromises here. First, I measured peak brightness at 463 nits, although the screen can reach 1,000 nits in bright rooms thanks to the ambient light sensor. However, you can’t force it to 1000 nits. According to my SpyderPro colorimeter, I measured an average Delta-E color error of 0.76, which is quite accurate. I will say that performance in the AdobeRGB color space only reached 88%, which is lower than what you get in OLED monitors.
Some warnings
There are some compatibility limitations for Studio Display XDR. No Intel Macs are supported, which shouldn’t be a problem for most people, as long as you haven’t purchased a Mac Pro recently. The desktop was the very last Intel-powered Mac in the lineup and wasn’t discontinued until 2023. Beyond that, some Macs can’t support the 120Hz refresh rate. For example, the M1 Pro, Max, and Ultra chips only support 60Hz on the Studio Display XDR. This means that even if you bought an M1 Ultra Mac Studio, you’re stuck at 60Hz. That’s disappointing.
It’s a smaller thing, but one of the USB-C ports on the back is for power delivery to charge your laptop via a single cable. This is common in monitors these days, but the one included can only provide 96 watts of power. The 16-inch MacBook Pro comes with a 140-watt power supply. If you’re doing intense tasks on something like the M5 Max, you need all that power, but that means slower charging. According to some reports, on the 14-inch MacBook Pro equipped with the M5 Max, it could not hold a charge with its own 96-watt power supply during heavy loads like gaming.
Then there’s the price. As with the Vision Pro, Apple is confident in charging a lot for this very specialized use case monitor. However, monitors with true HDR aren’t as new as they are in 2019. Back then, many monitors marketed HDR without the proper backlighting to back it up. But a lot has changed in seven years, and the market is now flooded with affordable OLED and Mini-LED monitors that can actually do HDR, thanks in large part to the popularity of OLED in PC gaming.
The particularity of Studio Display XDR therefore lies in the power of the HDR effect. Make no mistake: the complete package is very powerful, and the HDR performance is truly top-notch for those who want it. But like the Vision Pro, it won’t be the disruptive force it claims to be, and the majority of us will go back to wishing Apple would make a 32-inch monitor, or perhaps something more affordable to pair with the Mac mini or MacBook Air. For now, neither the Studio Display nor the Studio Display XDR are suitable.
