Yellow tinge from bottom to top of the screen, 27" iMac

I am in the same boat as you. I see it or I think i see it. I went to our local Apple store as well and none of them showed it. However I had a MacBook pro that has the same problem last year and at home I could see it clearly as a yellowish tint but in the store's lighting I could not see it at all. No kidding. They would say to me where is it? When I got back home I could see it again.

As far as changing I think at this point I'm going to stand pat. I have exchanged one for dust under the screen. I have at times gotten worse than what I had. I too feel if its there I have to work awfully hard to see it and convince myself I do. I do feel the screen is "warm" and compared to my macbook pro the whites are not as white. This problem seems to have gone on "forever" with Apple LCDs.

I think I'll buy AppleCare and stick it out. Only other choice is to get a refund and hope this is solved down the road.

This problem doesn't affect just the 27" model. I have two definitely yellow/warm patches on my 21.5" iMac. They're like sweat stains on a white T-shirt! Both patches are worse near the bottom of the screen, one just left of centre and the other on the right side. I have a very cool patch running between them. I'm not planning on doing any critical colour work, but it looks very ugly when I have anything up with a white background (like this web page). I keep wavering between living with it and asking for my iMac to be changed/repaired. I got as far as phoning Apple support and they set me up with an appointment at the Genius Bar on Saturday. It will be interesting to look at the iMacs in the Apple Store. Other than this, I also have the high pitched whistle linked to display brightness, and some slight flickering (nothing bad) at low brightnesses.

A couple quick points:

- This is a fairly powerful computer with a 27" LED screen for under $2k. This is really unheard of. So should we have been expecting top quality? Perhaps no, but as many mentioned, Apple is not shy touting the display.
- This is the first LED iMac (also a new body). There are ALWAYS bugs/issues in the first generation for any product.
- The previous generation of iMac's used an absolutely awful TN LCD display. I don't think they got any better revision to revision. But the LED display is actually usable for me.

It's tough not to pull out the credit card when a product this beautiful is released. But for those of us who demand top quality and pay especially close attention to detail, it may be worth keeping the credit card in our pockets until we actually see real-world performance.

So here's the funny thing. I went to that test website for the yellow tinge problem on my iPhone, and I swear I can see yellow tinge. Me eyes must be going...

Yea, my iPhone 3GS has yellow tinge too, the top is cooler while the bottom is warmer. I noticed it several months ago but I didn't ask for an exchange just because it does not bother me so much. If iPhone's LCD is also supplied by LG, well, hahahaha, holy ****!

I've just been into my local store, all the new iMacs there had a yellow tinge (some more pronounced than others, which could only be easily detected against grey backgrounds). I tested two 27 inch machines and 3 smaller ones - these were from batch 42, whilst my personal one with the issue is from week 48.

I'd really like to see one without the tinge, just so I know they exist...

I doubt that screens without the yellow tinge exist. My new week 48 iMac (just received it today) definitely has it. I suspect it's just a limitation of the technology. There's just so much crap stuffed behind that huge screen in the new iMacs that it seems logical that something's got to give...screen uniformity seems to be it in this case. I'm not happy about it, but I don't have any dead/stuck pixels, so I'm just going to live with it. I've got my AppleCare incase it starts to really grate at me in the future.

I used to seek perfection in consumer electronics (I've returned countless flat screen TVs, among other things, seeking the holy grail), and have come to the conclusion that, regardless of price, if it was made by humans, it's not going to be perfect.

[quote]it is an image with two grey bars. Download it, open in Preview and compare the upper and lower grey bar. On my screen the upper one looks fine but the lower one is very yellow/warm.[/quote]

I just placed the image on the screen of my 2008 iMac. I used Preview and rotated the image. Anything near the bottom of the screen was considerably lighter than what was at the top. So maybe this anomaly (in a slightly different form) isn't restricted to the new crop of iMacs.

GSears wrote:
Ugh! From one issue to the next... I'm on my 2nd iMac, after dealing with the flickering issue with an iMac from the 941 batch, I returned it today to hopefully find a new healthy replacement. This iMac, from the 947 batches hasn't shown any flickering issues, but it does have the yellow tint, something the other didn't have. I first noticed a "dirty" mark in the center of the screen and then noticed the yellow. Funny thing, when you bring up the levels in a photo of the screen... it kind of looks like a xerox of someone's backend. Maybe it's Apple being funny. Hmm.

You can see my screen here: http://www.gradwellsears.com/yellow

That's funny...and that's pretty much how my new iMac's screen looks. This is really aggravating to me. This computer is perfect in every other respect except for this display non-uniformity. I'll probably hang onto it for a week or so and see if the flickering starts up...if so, it's going back and I'm getting a refund. Otherwise, this discoloration seems to be a limitation of the all-in-one technology since so many people have seen this on their own and on other new iMacs. Grrrrr...!

The more I think about this issue, the more aggravated I am. To be honest, I'd be willing to live with it if I knew for a fact that this was as good as it's going to get. I'm really torn between keeping this machine and getting a replacement -- everything else is great about this machine. I might wind up just getting my money back -- we'll see.

of mine for those interested -- it's not quite that bad in person but it's certainly easy to see in the picture.

Hy, Same Problem Here With my imac 27" Yellow Tinge Left & Bottom of the Screen .... Its Quite difficult to work on a photo with this problem ......Is Apple Claiming These Kind Of Machine???

iMac LED wrote:
Hy, Same Problem Here With my imac 27" Yellow Tinge Left & Bottom of the Screen .... Its Quite difficult to work on a photo with this problem ......Is Apple Claiming These Kind Of Machine???

They probably are...but as common as this problem seems to be, there's a pretty high likelihood of you getting another with the same issue (other people in this thread certainly have).

Good photo and resembles what I saw on Imac number 2.
The 24in cinema display that I have replaced it with while I think what to do also shoes a degree of yellow to the bottom of the screen but no where near as badly and more importantly the whole screen is far more even with out these patches of magenta and green as per your photo.

As others have said, if Apple confirmed that these Imac screens were as good as it gets at least we all know where we stand

There should be no ounce of tolerating this issue by anyone. Pretending it was a stand alone, quality (ie pricey) display designed for merely looking at, you wouldn't tolerate it for a minute let alone begin retouching or producing any kind of graphic work on it. I have a Panasonic 42" flat panel that's one of the most neutral, even panels I have ever seen and all I do is watch TV on it. I don't understand the idea of near enough is good enough, I just don't. As a side comment, for the 24 hours I had my i5 I had done a Time Machine system restore and proceeded to perform a side by side comparison with my 20" G5 iMac with iSight 2.5GB. Opening a 21MP RAW file using CS4 on both computers, I opened the exact same file - the G5 took 22 seconds and the i5 only 3 seconds - absolutely awesome and extremely time saving! I think if this display issue was resolved, everyone would buy one.

I took my week 40 iMac in to the Genius Bar for the yellow patches and whistling. They offered a replacement even though I was out of my 14 days, which was good of them, but my replacement (week 45) has to go back too. The colour is much better on this one (some iMacs in the store were better than others) and the whistle is much less irritating, but I have a bit of dirt or something stuck under the display in the centre, about a quarter of the way down. I phoned the store and they've offered me another swap.