Display
The 13.3-inch display of the late 2012 MacBook Pro Retina boasts anti-scratch glass coating and an anti-glare filter. It is so effective that even under direct light you won't be bothered with reflections—that's the major advantage of Apple displays over those of the competitors. The display is not touch-sensitive, therefore it has no oleophobic coating. We tested the display in the native OS with the manual color control disabled.
Brightness can be set between 55 and 314 cd/m². At the maximum brightness you can work comfortably on a sunny day. The light sensor helps adjust brightness automatically: from 6 cd/m² in the dark to and 290 cd/m² in a very bright environment. This isn't enough for both cases though. There is almost no backlight modulation, so you won't notice flickering at low brightness.
The display is based on an IPS panel, so the viewing angles are very good. At wide angles there's some black shift—typical for IPS panels—but here it's much less noticeable at least.
At the right angle the black depth is very good. The black-white-black response time is 23.1 ms (13.0 ms switch on + 10.1 ms switch off). The 25%-to-75% halftone response is 34.3 ms. The contrast is 900:1, which is much higher than that of a typical IPS panel. The 32-point gamma curve shows no trouble in either lights or darks. The gamma is 2.34, which is a bit higher than the standard value of 2.2. The gamma curve nearly repeats the power law at that:
The color gamut of the late 2012 MacBook Pro Retina is identical to sRGB. That's very good, because most digital content is optimized for the sRGB gamut and will look natural on this display.
On the spectrum graph you can see that color components mix only moderately.
The color temperature stays very close to 6500 K along the entire axis. The ΔE is about 4 which is very nice for a consumer device. The latter doesn't vary much as well, which is important for subjective perception of colors.
In general, the late 2012 MacBook Pro Retina features one of the best displays we've ever seen in a laptop.
Write a comment below. No registration needed!
