I believe that there is an issue with the factory calibration of my 15" MacBook Pro 2016. This was the first MacBook with a DCI-P3 display and I got mine in December. I want to find out if this is a known problem and is this fixed in some of the later batches.
The color management profile for the display is retrieved from the hardware on every reboot and stored in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays/Color LCD-<UUID>.icc where UUID is a hardware identifier. This profile is said to be individually calibrated in the factory during production.
Upon examination, it appears that the hardware provided profile is more close to sRGB colorspace than to the DCI-P3 one.
Color LCD colorspace over the generic Display P3 profile (gray).
The colorspace difference is quite visible on this screenshot. Inner triangle is Color LCD, outer is Display P3.
When using Color LCD all the colors are blown to the P3 colorspace, resulting in quite vivid colors. Also I'm unable to view the Webkit color gamut site correctly. If I'm using the Display P3 profile everything looks better. In both cases I don't have an individually calibrated display.
I would like to find out:
- If this is a recognized problem by Apple. I believe this might be an issue with the first batch of 2016 MBPs. Issue such this shouldn't stay unnoticed.
- Is there a way to regenerate the Color LCD icc profile, but with wider gamut, keeping the individual calibration data intact. Will changing rXYZ/gXYZ/bXYZ (colorant tristimulus) be the way to go?
EDIT:
I did dump EDID from the display, and the Chromaticity Coordinates (bits 23-34 differ from the ones in the Color LCD profile. Using them to recreate the ICC profile makes one very close to the Generic DCI-P3 one. Seems the EDID contains right information, but macOS is not generating a valid color profile. I did fire a rdar, let's see..
Best Answer
After waiting for almost two years for Apple to fix this clearly software bug (Apple Care active for this machine), I went to an AASP and requested a display replacement. The issue was demonstrated (along with a few sq. mm of missing coating) and was replaced for free.