New Monitor for my A700, KM5D, A100, and 7Hi Pix!

[Greg Beetham]

That doesn't sound too good...about the Samsung's especially, I bought a Samsung 24" not long ago.
Greg

[David Kilpatrick]

Impressive specification Don. If I had been able to get one of these two years ago, when I tried a Samsung with vertical pivoting which was unusable due to shading with viewing angles, I would never had got an iMac - I would have stuck with G5/Pro tower type machines instead.

David

[alphaomega]

Don
Glad to see you back and a happy new year to you too. The HP looks good. I am toying with the idea of getting a 22" LCD monitor to replace my "old" 18" Viewsonic. I have my eyes on the Viewsonic VP2250wb with the following brief spec. from their Web site:

ViewSonic’s 21.6” VP2250wb widescreen LCD is a professional- grade display with 106% NTSC colour capability for richer more natural colours. Ideal for graphics production, financial and medical professionals where precise colour rendition is vital to the job. The VP2250wb features 3000:1 DYNAMIC CONTRAST RATIO (typ.) and ultra-fast ClearMotiv 2ms (grey-to-grey) response time for SUPERIORFRONT-OF-SCREEN
PERFORMANCE. Designed with the discriminating professional in mind, this display offers extensive ergonomic adjustments including height adjust, tilt, 120º swivel and pivot, and even a quick release stand.

Note the 106% extended gamut. Anyone with experience of using this LCD display - not as good as the HP.

Don, please give us an update on performance when you have the new acquisition installed and working.

[David Kilpatrick]

Don, give a serious thought to the ColorMunki Photo - I found it to be better than the Spyder 2 Pro which I have, and the ability to calibrate printers and create a really good ICC profile (better than some custom services) is impressive - it means you can use almost any paper in any printer, and get a screen to print match - the software suite with it is also excellent (it seems to be a distant relative of the old Colortron ColorShop software).

David

[pakodominguez]

Thanks, DK. I have never been totally happy with the Spyder2 and it is known not to work properly on wide gamut displays. Spyder3 has been updated for wide gamut but I have read of it having problems covering some wide gamuts still. I notice the ColorMunki had a recent bugfix regarding wide gamut...is this unit bullet proof on wide gamut displays?

It is constraint software or hardware related?
I'm not specially happy with the Spyder2 either, and I have the "Pro" software...

[Javelin]

I'll get better monitors next time around. I replaced all out 20" mags with cheaper 22" LG's LCD's and got one to replace my mitsubishi at home. I'm still nto enamoured with the LCD's for Computers.. but they sure use space better

[David Kilpatrick]

Shirley is so ill right now I wouldn't even try to ask her, but her colour science involved surprisingly little to do with computer monitors (they were all so inaccurate back then) and everything to do with matching prints. What she did was to create Photoshop LUTS (in the age before printer profiles existed) that enabled two entirely different types of printer, with metamerism present in 'matched' colours, to turn out apparently matched prints. If she was given all the technical info and data on a device and a day or two to remember what's what, she might be able to comment - but, like me, she prefers visual calibration to using a hardware device. I guess we would both like AdobeRGB or larger gamut screens but they are on an option right now!

David

[Javelin]

I guess once you have a formula and refined enough chemicals the inks are perfectly the same every single time there made. electronic solid state devices are mostly made on the "thats close enough" principle 2 will never be exactlythe same no mater what and they would change with the least little think like temperature, age, current drops and surges .... but really this is the same as our eyes isn't it?

[David Kilpatrick]

I am with DK and Shirley on calibration to some extent as sometimes I do scrap the colorimeter and calibrate by eye.

I should explain that we are using iBook, Powerbook and iMac right now - our 256MB graphics card (etc) all lives on older G5 tower machines which we don't use. The Mac Intel thing effectively forced us to abandon two very powerful large systems. We can't afford the new equivalents, so an iMac 24 inch was what had to come instead. While this has decent graphics, it's not upgradeable and it does use some dithering. It really isn't true 24-bit colour.

What I have found with hardware calibration is that first the brightness must often be turned down so low I find the whole screen dull to view, so I prefer to work to native white point and factory set medium brightness/contrast. Even doing a hardware calibration for gamma can introduce funny banding, tone breaks, colour shifts and stuff on an iMac 24 inch - but using the native set up produces perfectly smooth colours. So, when I create a colour profile using the ColorMunki, I do a visual calibration first to native gamma, white point and brightness. I then do the hardware profiling, but I do not make any adjustments - I force the hardware the create a profile for my monitor, rather than letting it force the monitor to match a specific profile. This usually turns out to be so close to the visually created profile I can switch between them with no visible shift.

This method gives me minimal artificial noise, banding, posterization, pink/green skin shadow shifts and other stuff which you often see with hardware calibrated monitors lacking sufficient bit depth. Of course with a 10-bit monitor, true 32-bit card or better, wide gamut, high end harware calibration, viewing hood etc you don't expect to see these things. But just try sticking a Pantone Huey on an iBook (we have got one, we know!) and the result is awful.

David

[fastson]

Great stuff Sonolta. Congrats, looks like a fantastic monitor.

I have been looking at it as I also need a proper screen. Sadly it seems to be in low stock at the moment, I have been eyeing another one instead within the price range.

[fastson]

Good call Sonolta.

I think most if not all PCI/AGP cards outlass the on board GPUs. I noticed a massive system slowdown when I was forced to use the on board graphics on my older computer (the real GPU had fried because the fan stopped working, so while I was waiting for a new card I had to use the built in GPU on the motherboard).

Everything from Photoshop to surfing image intensive web-sites suffered.

The difference that I found between analogue VGA to digital DVI-D is the image is sharper when using DVI-D, when your using VGA the image is ever so slightly blurred. Not really noticeable if your not looking for it.

[fastson]

What you say is correct, most of it is up to the internals of the monitor. The monitor I tested on is a cheap Samsung TFT panel. The difference was very minor though, you could only tell by looking closely and at a sterile windows enviroment.

In my earlier life I ran 7 TV/Electronic stores where it was my job to keep two hundred screens tweaked at each store to their best possible picture.

Nice. I wish we had more people who had this job. When I was checking out the local MediaMarkt store all the screens were calibrated differently (they were all feeded the same source, regular SDTV content). Some screens looked alright while others looked horrible. I actually used the remote controll to set it to the factory settings since it was all messed up.

[Mark K]

Interestingly I am thinking having a 30" for my Intel/Vista system, in addition to existing 24" LCD

[fastson]

Well I ended up with this. The HP took its time to get back into stock and I couldn't wait. It was more expensive, I paid around 540USD for it.





I like the colour profiles which you can switch on the fly.

[REAlpha]

Dear Sonolta (and others),

Just catching up on this thread as I am currently looking to buy a 22 inch monitor in the same class. Indeed the prad tests show that two monitors are on top of the class, the HP LP2275 and the Eizo S2231. As you chose the HP over the Eizo, I was wondering for what reasons you did so (the prad test also mentioned that the Eizo had the edge and was little more expensive)? Also, how does it work, now you have had it for a couple of months?

Are there also others having experience with either the Eizo or the HP?