Apple Cinema Display Packs in the Pixels

Apple has announced the Apple Cinema Display, a ground-breaking 22-inch thin film transistor (TFT) active-matrix LCD display. The all-digital monitor, which Apple claims is the largest LCD display to reach market, has an active viewing area equivalent to a 24-inch CRT monitor, with a native resolution of 1,600 by 1,024 pixels at 16.7 million colors (24-bit color), enough to display two full pages of text or full-screen DVD movies without letterboxing. Not surprisingly, Apple expects supplies of the hard-to-manufacture display to be extremely limited when it ships in October or November (depending on which Apple Store page you believe), so it will be available only through the Apple Store and only with a 450 MHz Power Macintosh G4 (and its ATI RAGE 128 Pro graphics card) for $6,500. The display’s clear enclosure is also designed to match with the graphite-and-white color scheme of the new Power Mac G4s. Considering its price tag of $4,000 if sold separately ($2,500 more than Apple’s 21-inch CRT-based Apple Studio Display), the Apple Cinema Display is not yet a display for the rest of us.