At 1600 by 1024, the image on the ACD is razor sharp. For many, the text may be too small at this resolution, however, because the ACD is a LCD, you can sit pretty much as close as you want to the screen without eye-fatigue. There actually are a whole slew of resolutions available that Apple does not list in their spec sheet. The problem with all of these resolutions is that, in order to draw them on the fixed pixels of a LCD, some weird pixel manipulation has to go on. Because of this, the images at all but 1600x1024 look fuzzy and poorly defined. Text is more difficult to read, even when it's larger. Basically, other resolutions may be good for when you want to play Quake III, but 1600 by 1024 is the only resolution worth running in normal use.

User controls (hardware and software)

With a CRT, you want as many controls as possible. This just isn't necessary with an LCD. There are no image distortions to work around. There is no problem with the image not reaching the edges of the screen or color guns not being perfectly aligned. So the lack of controls in a way actually reflects a positive aspect of the ACD. The specifications do not tell the whole story though. Apple does include some color controls in ColorSync, allowing easy basic color matching and tweaking the colors, brightness, and contrast to be more accurate.

Screen treatment

This is pretty normal fare for monitors, even cheap ones, nowadays. We never noticed any glare for the time we saw the ACDs, though Seybold was not a high-glare environment.

Connectors and cables

The ACD does not have a normal analog VGA interface. It uses a DVI digital flat panel interface. With analog signal LCDs, your computer has digital data inside it that the video card converts to analog and sends out through the monitor cable. The LCD hardware would then translate the signal back into a digital signal for use with the LCD display. The digital to analog and back again process causes a quality loss. By skipping all analog conversions, the DVI allows a cleaner image than with analog setups. The specific kind of DVI interface the ACD uses is the newer TMDS interface. This is a signaling method that doubles video bandwidth over an older DVI interface, much like Low Voltage Differential SCSI doubles bandwidth over Ultra Wide SCSI. The older DVI interface does not have the bandwidth to draw millions of colors at higher resolutions but DVI with TMDS does.