It's obvious why this monitor is legendary among Mac users. It's a no-compromise, professional display that delivers optimum image quality for heavy publishing work.

PLUS

• Elegant physical design
• USB and FireWire ports, with integrated cable
• Superb image quality (and size)

MINUS

• Adjustable tilt, but not height or rotation
• Response time a bit sluggish for video
• The price!

In size, quality and prestige (not to mention price), this one's clearly the top of the heap. This is more monitor than most of us really need, but seductively like the monitor we really want.

Screen size is 30 inches, and resolution an amazing 2560x1600 pixels. That's a lot of room for desktop work. (Mac users will put a lot of miles on their mouse, with the single menu always up at the top of the screen.)

Physically, the Apple Cinema HD is a featureless silvery slab, suspended on a base formed from a single curved sheet. The only interruption in the rounded casing is along the lower back edge: two FireWire ports and two USB ports. The latter are perfect for attaching the Mac mouse and keyboard, which, coincidentally, come with very short cords.

One minor annoyance: the video cable is captive at the monitor end, and hence can't be removed or replaced by the user. On the other hand, a nice bonus: USB, FireWire and power connections are bundled together with video, so there's only the one cable to deal with.

Oddly, however, the Cinema HD was the only monitor I can recall ever seeing that had an external power brick. It's a smooth, pearly-white oblong, and because the cables are all united, it will have to live quite close to your computer.

Controls on the Cinema HD display are minimal: three barely-recessed touch-dots on the right outside edge of the bezel. One is an on-off switch; the other two increase and decrease brightness through a relatively small range. These take some getting used to. It's easy to power off the monitor while groping for brightness.

Everything else happens through software, and not much even there. User control on the Mac consists of picking one of several pre-defined colour profiles, including the older Adobe RGB, default Cinema HD, and standard sRGB. This will thrill desktop-publishing types: there are few ways to configure the display wildly off-spec.

You can also create a custom profile, but even then your options are closely limited by a series of wizard-style dialogs. I chose 2.2 gamma (standard for TV or PCs) rather than the brighter Mac-standard 1.8. And I set color to D65 (a standard white-point that includes my favoured 6500°K colour temperature).

Although this system leaves no option for quickly changing to different preset colour and brightness settings, I found that the defaults worked well across all applications. The Cinema HD displayed the desktop without undue harshness, yet handled DVD video equally well.

But it was with photography that the Cinema HD really came into its own. I was able to display my many five-megapixel photos with almost no downsizing. Colour fidelity and depth of blacks was stunning. And at 30 inches wide, looking at holiday snaps was like being there all over again.