Fascinating. This makes me wish Apple made TVs, because at least then there'd be a popular, properly calibrated standard for people to compare against.
There already is a digital standard, and there has been pretty much forever.
Historically, Apple's been a thorn in the side of colour correction. When they created the Macintosh, they threw standards out the window and decided on a gamma level that was different than every other digital system in existence -- 1.8, as opposed to the standard of 2.2. They argued that even though 2.2 was the standard, 1.8 was a closer match to print, so they were going to be their own special flower and make everyone's life a nightmare. Which, you know, may have made an ounce of sense at the time, if the assumption that people would use Macs only for desktop publishing, and never for anything else.
It doesn't explain why they stubbornly ignored the standard and did their own thing until
2009, and some Macs out there are
still wrong.
Of course, if your Mac isn't properly set up and for some reason is displaying the wrong gamma levels -- which happens -- or if your colour drifts and you need to modify your display settings, they actually
hide all that information from you. It's not just buried deep in a menu somewhere, you have to open System Preferences, go to Display, then Color, and then
hold the option key while clicking Calibrate.
If Apple starts making TVs, I quit. I'm done. A lifetime wasted on compensating for h264 gamma shifts and improperly calibrated operating systems. I can't do that again. I
can't.
breathes heavily into paper bag
What were we talking about?