Apple’s next (full-size) iPad is going to be an incredible tool for Photographers

Any working commercial, wedding or portrait photographer has to be at least part salesperson. You can do an incredible job shooting a subject and still not make enough to pay the bills if you don’t sell the client on the images. That’s why I was so excited for the first iPad back when I was shooting for money.

One of the most crucial parts of the sales process was presenting either your portfolio or your proofs in a way that was easy for the client and rendered them beautifully. I used to use an HDTV hooked up to a computer, then an Apple TV, to run a slideshow of the images. But when the iPad came around, it was a revelation. You could load up an album and have the client look through their images while you talked about your various offerings and made them feel comfortable enough to purchase what you were pitching. The images were easy to navigate and, I felt, presented well on the display.

But the first iPad’s display was total crap compared to the newest model’s Retina display, and that display is about to get a massive upgrade of its own.

If you’ve been following the iPhone 5’s technology at all, then you’ll know that it contains one of the best display panels ever included in a piece of consumer technology. Its in-cell design makes it super thin and pushes the images to the very surface of the screen, juuuust under the glass. And the panel is mind boggling. Tests run by folks like Chris Heinonen at Anandtech and Displaymate have rated it as comparable to professional displays costing tens of thousands of dollars.

It’s inconceivable at this point that the next iPad (likely due out in the first part of next year) wouldn’t also include this technology.

It should make the device thinner as its screen gets the iPhone laminated treatment for the first time and that should—in turn—make it lighter.

This means that you’re going to be carrying around a multi-thousand-dollar reference-quality monitor in tablet form for $500. The money shot for photographers is this one from Heinonen’s review:

Note the bars on the right which show incredibly low error ratings for color readings. An average dE2000 number for the iPhone 4S was 11. The average dE2000 of the iPhone 5 is 2.23. As any photographer knows, color gamut is everything. Being able to accurately reproduce color with low variation across the sRGB palette is a baseline for almost any decent DSLR, but that’s only true of the best monitors.

Because of its aggressive supply chain tactics and push for the very best parts, the next iPad should be an amazing tool to help photographers display and sell their photographs.