Just how good is the iPad’s color?

We often hear industry professionals complain that their work ends up being viewed on smaller and smaller screens. At the same time we increasing hear that clients want dailies delivered on iPads and we know they frequently use such devices to review work in progress.
As Apple released the third generation iPad we saw two different reports suggesting that this new device had very accurate color – even describing it as being close to a professional broadcast monitor.  That claim seemed like something we should check out so we loaded up an iPad 3 with normal test images and borrowed a Photo Research PR-650 SpectraScan Colorimeter to test it. Testing a $500 consumer device that has only a brightness control with a $12,000 Colorimeter – Hey why not?


We started by adjusting the brightness control to have the display produce close to 30 footlamberts and found that with the brightness set to about 50% we were close. We then set out to measure values using images of 100% white, 50% and 10%. Here are the target values for rec 709 along with what we measured:


revised vaules (fixed typo)

That is remarkable.


And if we measure the red, green and blue bars in SMPTE color bars:


We attended a web seminar by Datacolor about their Spyder4 monitor calibration system and they mentioned they have a means of calibrating iPads and iPhones. With clients often working remotely it may not be possible to calibrate their devices – so we wanted to know just how the new iPad was right out of the box. We didn’t do this in a scientific manner especially as we used a sample size of only one iPad, but we were impressed by what we observed.

Where does this leave us?  We are impressed by the color on our iPad, just looking at images tells us a lot and comparing them visually to a calibrated client monitor is what made us want to do these tests. On a laptop there are many adjustments that can be fiddled with that can affect the image, one advantage on the iPad is there is no user accessible color control, except brightness. As you can see from the above data the iPad is remarkably close to what we would expect and we now feel a whole lot less nervous about clients judging work on them.

Special thanks to Marcus Hutchinson for his assistance with this testing.