A slight "ouch" on the $399 Cinema Display. I use a pair of them on my office machine (An early 2007 Mac Pro) and I haven't been overly impressed. They have good-quality 24 bit LCDs which certainly beat the wishy-washy unevenly-lit 18 bit screens you'll find in a $150 Acer or whatnot, but with the pair of them I've been put off by several issues:
1: The stand attached to it looks pretty, but it has no height adjustment. Furthermore, one or both of the monitors I have is crooked with the edge of one sitting almost a quarter inch higher than the one next to it when they're put side by side. The only way to "fix" it is to pile some business cards under the edge of one of the monitors' stand to make a shim, and doing that creates its own problems. I know Apple *has* to make everything "pretty", but thanks to a form-over-function design and poor quality control the end result here is a stand functionally inferior to the one included with all but the very cheapest competing monitors. (And of course if you want another stand for functional or ergonomic reasons you have to buy an adapter plate, since it would of been design heresy to put VESA mounting holes directly on the monitor.)
2: On both of them I *swear* I can see the florescent backlight flickering out of the corner of my eye. The only time I've seen that before is on really cheap/really old laptops. It comes and goes, perhaps it's powerline noise making it through insufficient filtering in the power supplies?
Of course, you didn't say what vintage 23" display you bought. Apple constantly makes subtle feature changes in the line, perhaps your will be from a better batch.
1: The stand attached to it looks pretty, but it has no height adjustment. Furthermore, one or both of the monitors I have is crooked with the edge of one sitting almost a quarter inch higher than the one next to it when they're put side by side. The only way to "fix" it is to pile some business cards under the edge of one of the monitors' stand to make a shim, and doing that creates its own problems. I know Apple *has* to make everything "pretty", but thanks to a form-over-function design and poor quality control the end result here is a stand functionally inferior to the one included with all but the very cheapest competing monitors. (And of course if you want another stand for functional or ergonomic reasons you have to buy an adapter plate, since it would of been design heresy to put VESA mounting holes directly on the monitor.)
2: On both of them I *swear* I can see the florescent backlight flickering out of the corner of my eye. The only time I've seen that before is on really cheap/really old laptops. It comes and goes, perhaps it's powerline noise making it through insufficient filtering in the power supplies?
Of course, you didn't say what vintage 23" display you bought. Apple constantly makes subtle feature changes in the line, perhaps your will be from a better batch.