Apple 27" Thunderbolt Display-Poor Quality

I recently purchased a 2012 Thunderbolt equipped Mac Mini and had it upgraded with a 240 Gb SSD in addition to the internal hard drive. I was looking forward to getting the 27" Thunderbolt diaplay to pair it to. I finely got the money together and bought one yesterday and had to wait til last night to set it up.

WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT !!!!!

I was taken aback when viewing it alongside my 2008 iMac 24". The 'whites' on my iMac were truly "white" as opposed to the blue hue on the new 'expensive' Thunderbolt Display. I got up this morning and switched everything back on to re evaluate what I had seen last night. On closer inspection and viewing the Mac Rumours front page, the blue tint at the top remained blue all the way from the top to bottom rather than fading to white. I then opened the Apple.Com page and could clearly see that the left hand side of the display had a serious blue hint which went to "white ish" on the far right of the screen.

I packaged it back up and returned it to the apple reseller who promptly took it to the engineers upstairs behind locked doors. Whilst I walked around the store I checked the other Displays that were 'on display' and noticed that the other 2 Thunderbolt Displays were not much better. I then glanced at the new iMac and was immediately blown away at how amazing the screen looked. The "whites' were truly "white' and their was not a hint of blue or a different hue anywhere around the screen. I fell in love with the new iMac and realised what a mistake I may have made by not just purchasing the 27" iMac in the first place.

The sales assistant shortly returned and confirmed that there was something wrong with the brand new out of the box display and offered me a refund which I took. In no time I was grabbing the attention of the other sales assistants who were almost agreeing with my findings re the Thunderbolt displays not being as good as the new iMacs and witnessing the poor light and saturation qualities of the Thunderbolt display.
So what to do know....await a new batch of Thunderbolts and try again, sell my new Mac Mini and buy an iMac, buy a Dell Monitor (although I truly want gloss believe it or not!!!)
OR
Buy a second hand 2011 27" iMac and use it as a display through the Thunderbolt ports
Anyone feel like I do re the Thunderbolt display and have suffered the same issues Any thoughts ??
Anyone using a 2012 Mac Mini with a 2011 iMac as a Display? Would like to know your experiences with this.??

I'm not super knowledgeable on this. however, I believe all 27" imacs are factory calibrated. There is no way to do that with a TB display. It has to be done when it is finally hooked up to its editing machine.

But the 27" imac and the 27" TB display are identical with the exception of all the computery type parts. I received my 27" imac last week and I have to say, even with the "factory calibration" it was way too bright and way too cool (blue) out of the box. I ran my old x rite eye one display on it and now it is much much better.

I would guess you just need to calibrate it.

Did you calibrate the display with a colorimeter?

I was going to get a TBD but as I researched and read the horror stories of bad colors, some of them dying in less than 1 week of use for no apparent reason, illumination differences across the screen and many others, I decided to wait.
LG is putting out their new stuff said to compete with the Dell Ultrasharp 2713H so I hope it performs better.
The TBD is the most beautiful monitor available, but I´m more interested in IQ than looks... and for that kind of price, I´ll let this one pass...

Alex_Venom wrote in post #15926880
I was going to get a TBD but as I researched and read the horror stories of bad colors, some of them dying in less than 1 week of use for no apparent reason, illumination differences across the screen and many others, I decided to wait.
LG is putting out their new stuff said to compete with the Dell Ultrasharp 2713H so I hope it performs better.
The TBD is the most beautiful monitor available, but I´m more interested in IQ than looks... and for that kind of price, I´ll let this one pass...

Nice to hear your comments Alex. I did think for a while that I was on my own regarding these issues. Have to agree that it does look the best monitor there is but I am into sharpness and well balanced tones....oh and one should not have to ask much for the 'whites' on a £900ish display to be "whiter than white". What a let down !!!

Anyone know of any other gloss displays out there to compete with Apple?

Did you read all the good stories of ATD use and all the photography monitor reviews? We have had zero problems with ours.

same thing happened to me. i got a thunderbolt and it was vastly different to my older imac. but i read online that pretty much all of them have a cooler color cast. so i went to the store. got me a color munki . and now im a happy camper