Thunderbolt Display Makes Its Mark

 

Apple's 27-inch Thunderbolt Display may just be the cleverest display ever. It's ideal for owners of the 2011 MacBook Air.

The Thunderbolt Display looks like the 27-inch LED Cinema Display released last year. Like its predecessor, the Thunderbolt Display has three USB 2.0 ports, but what's new is the addition of a Fire Wire 800 port, a gigabit Ethernet port, and (of course) a Thunderbolt port.

The display has a permanently attached cable, which splits into two connectors: a MagSafe adapter for charging laptops, and a Thunderbolt cable that feeds the video into the display and also provides all the connectivity between your Mac and external devices. For example, you can connect a FireWire 800 hard drive to the Thunderbolt Display, and that hard drive is then connected to your Mac via Thunderbolt. Ethernet and USB devices work similarly. Your devices won't perform any faster, however—although Thunder-horizontal viewing angles, a built-in mic, and a 49-watt speaker system—features found on the LED Cinema Display. The built-in camera has been updated from an iSight to a FaceTime HD device.
 

The Thunderbolt Display requires OS X 10.6.8 or later and a Thunderbolt-there are many different light sources can be problematic.

The Thunderbolt Display, like the LED Cinema Display, offers adjustments only in the Displays preference pane, which has a dated, squint-at-the-screen manual calibration process. You can also change the brightness, gamma, and target color temperature in Displays.

Making Connections

Systems with integrated graphics, such as the MacBook Air and the $599 Mac mini, can support two displays. The Air's built-in screen counts, so you can use it with one external Thunderbolt display.
 

Macs with discrete graphics can use three displays. If you have a Thunderbolt Display, you can connect a second Thunderbolt Display to it. You can't connect an LED Cinema Display to the Thunderbolt port of the Thunderbolt Display, but in our testing, when we attached Promise Technology's Pegasus R6 Thunderbolt RAID ($1,999; www.promise.com), we could connect an LED Cinema Display (which uses the Mini Display Port) to the Pegasus R6's second Thunderbolt port. The Thunderbolt Display makes the MacBook Air a more compelling choice for a computer. The display brings some seriously fast I/O connections to Apple's smallest laptop. Previously, connecting a MacBook Air to a wired LAN required an optional USB-to-Ethernet connector, and external drives were limited to poky USB 2.0 transfer speeds. Now, MacBook Air users can use gigabit ethernet and FireWire 800 devices through the Thunderbolt Display.

Image Quality

We used a ColorMunki Photo display calibrator to calibrate the Thunderbolt Display. For comparison, we also looked at the 27-inch iMac, the 27-inch LED Cinema Display, and an HP ZR30W monitor. The displays were set to a D65 (6500K color temperature) white point, a 2.2 gamma, and 100 cd/ m2 brightness. As expected, the Thunderbolt Display looked just like the LED Cinema Display. We didn't find any dead or stuck pixels, or light leakage from the edges. Uniformity across the screen was not a problem. 

The wide viewing angle means that when sharing the screen, people next to you are seeing the same thing you are, colorwise. There is very little loss of contrast as you move left to right or up and down from the center. Grays were neutral after calibration, and the glossy screen helps photos look richer but not overblown, with deep blacks.

ThePirado's Buying Advice
 

For owners of the 2011 MacBook Air, the Thunderbolt Display is a fantastic way to get connectivity features while walking away with one of the lightest laptops available. If your Mac has Thunderbolt, FireWire 800, and gigabit Ethernet, the case for buying the comparatively inflexible Thunderbolt Display is a little less convincing.

$999; Apple, www.apple.com