Hey, good lookin'!
It evenworks with a projector.
Color calibration is common in high-end design, movie, and photography workflows.
Apple
Its not just about making the images look good on screen.
Its about making them accurate.
And now, with iOS 14.5, Apple isbringing it to your home TV.
Apple
Not Calibrated
The Apple TVs color-balancing is similar to display calibration.
When you calibrate a display, you use acolorimeterto compare the color output of the screen to available colors.
The Apple TV version uses your iPhones front-facing True-Depth camera in place of a colorimeter.
Apple
The iPhones cameras are, it seems, accurate enough for this kind of task.
Toperform color-balancing, you place the iPhone onto a rectangle shown on the TV screen.
The Apple TV sends a rectangle that cycles through several colors, and the iPhone measures the results.
The Apple TV then tweaks its output, so the TV shows a more neutral color balance.
Its important to note that your television is not part of this calibration.
The Apple TV adjusts its own output instead of instructing the TV to change its behavior.
This doesnt just save money.
Older displays use an LED panel that stays lit the whole time.
Dark areas are achieved by blocking this backlight with LCD pixels.
The iPads Liquid Retina XDR display instead uses over 10,000 tiny LEDs to illuminate the display from the back.
By contrast, the32-inch Pro Display XDRhas only 576 LEDs.
And that makes sense.
With the iPhone and iPad, the rig is pretty much just a screen, with some supporting hardware.
Therumors say that the next MacBook Pro will sport this new iPad screenor something very similar.
The iPad, Mac, and iPhone already look amazing.
The screens are fantastic, and few people really need the innovations coming to Apples pro devices.
But TVs dont generally look so good.
This has one significant side effect for Apple, at least.
