When the XDR came out it was competing with monitors that were 40,000 USD and up. (With some compromises like the stand which is just an art piece and the viewing angles being squiff). If the competition is now priced competitively then that’s very good for consumers.
Yeah, this, it really irks me how some people here keep parroting Apple's marketing without checking any facts/tests.
Their monitor is great for a consumer or prosumer monitor but just because it has PRO in the name doesn't mean it can dance in the ring with the actual PRO displays that are used to master million dollar motion pictures.
The point of the 6k Pro HDR wasn't to compete with the one or two $40k monitors used to master million dollar motion pictures.
It was to replace the five to ten other $40k monitors used in other parts of the production pipeline, by being accurate/wide/bright enough for that purpose, and to provide good-enough accuracy to a whole swath of jobs where it was dearly needed but far too expensive.
In Apple's keynote announcing the XDR they literally called it the "World's best pro display" and then proceded to compare it to Sony's $40k reference monitor. I agree the comparisons are unfair and that at $5k it occupies an interesting price point in the market, but Apple did really bring it upon themselves.
The stand makes a bit more sense when you consider this monitor for movie use. Reference monitors need to move from on-site racks for director use, to studio use for editing. The ability to easily detach it from a fixed stand and move it to a cart for on-site use is an important feature.
Maybe in small low-budget indy film making would the director be using the same equipment on set as they would in post. One where the director is also the editor is also the writer is also the producer. You know the ones. Typically, everything on set is a rental. The post studio would have their own equipment fitted for their rooms. I could see maybe a DIT taking their monitor to a cart and then back to a desktop in between gigs, but probably not then.
Bit of a random rant, but despite being so common, 27” at 4K is a really poor combination for a computer monitor. At 1x scaling, everything is too small, but at 2x scaling it’s far too big. So you have to go for a non-integer scale, which on macOS at least results in reduced image quality and graphics performance (it renders to a different sized frame buffer and then scales it).
The ideal is 5K, which is double 2560x1440 in each dimension, but essentially the only 5K displays available are the LG one made in partnership with Apple, which is over a grand and has numerous quality issues, or the one built into the iMac. It’s really annoying.
I like that Dell display (I mostly use Dell and LG displays) and most people should certainly save the money. The areas where the specs aren't the same are really significant though (e.g., resolution, as you noted, is a major difference despite only being one of the specs. Brightness, dynamic brightness, and size are also quite significant and drivers of major cost differences in just about any monitor comparison.)
If you're only using it for light HDR work, both are almost equally usable, and if you're mastering HDR content all the time, you'll need a dual-LCD panel anyway (as the sony hxr-310).
But you're right, the additional 3000$ are definitely noticeable - but if they're noticeable enough to justify that price tag is another question.
Agreed; ultimately the XDR is for people who, for whatever reason, just want a really nice, large monitor in sync with macOS' color management enough to pay the premium.
They're both IPS panels with locla area dimming, the same amount of halo effect, the same color accuracy, and relatively similar brightness and dpi, especially considering there's a price difference of 4× inbetween.
What's so "mediocre POS" about them in your opinion?
You've got a typo there, it's 4K at 27" with 163dpi vs 6K at 32" with 215dpi, so 1.5× vs 2× resolution. Which actually has an interesting effect when working with content, as the Pro Display XDR either has to show a letterbox around UHD content, or has to stretch it in a very blurry way with GPU upscaling which definitely isn't useful for content production workflows.
And the halo effect actually is an artifact from the backlighting which can be resolved with the backlight recalibration cycle, which the Pro Display XDR does automatically and invisibly during times with purely SDR content, while it has to be manually run and is very obtrusive on the Dell one, that much is true.
