It is time for a better monitor on my system. With a big Epson printer in house I need some more control.
I know I should buy Eizo Coloredge, but the price is scaring. I want at least a 24" panel. Anybody here who are updated on this?
Anybody who have experience with the cheaper Eizo's? I'm not on a really tight budget, so I don't need to go for the cheapies.

Not Eizo, but I have the HP LP2275w, and the 2475w, its big brother, uses H-IPS and got raving reviews, so you might want to take a look at it.

I read a lot of good stuff about the 24" HP 2475w and less than £400 I believe here in UK. I may be tempted myself with one if Father Christmas can get it down the chimney this year.

Review here: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/hp_lp2475w.htm

JP

Thanks Alexandre and John! Looks extremely interesting that HP monitor. I've been looking mainly at Eizo and Dell before. The HP looks definitely like good value at just over NOK 4000 ex vat

For what it's worth, and though the technology is not exactly the same, I am extremely happy with the 2275w for photographic use.

Spectraview is quite a lot better than the 2475. I have the HP 2475 at work and it has a very annoying "rainbow effect" that is visible in high contrast areas (bright against dark). The NEC does not suffer from this.

I am quite sensitive to this kind of effects. I bet some people don't see it, and then the 2475 is a good choice.

2475 doesn't have a polarizer like NEC which means that the black levels will suffer while viewed at angle.

/ Jacob

I'm sure the Spectraview 2690 is a good monitor, but the price is up in the Eizo pricerange too.. But thanks anyway

I see the web photographic world through a cheap Dell 17" monitor that came with the computer, I wonder what I'm missing out on in that tecnicolour world.

I think I should treat myself to a decent one.

:(

I hope I'm not stealing your thread Lars :-)

I'm just about to buy a new monitor for finishing a book project and I've almost decided to get the 22" ColorEdge CG222WK. This is around ?1100 and I don't want to go higher than that. But when I read this thread I thought I might as well ask if any of you know some pros and cons with this one. To me it's slightly irritating with the "low" 1680 × 1050 resolution, but the way I thought about it was that the benefits of its high build quality and that it should be easy to keep calibrated by far outweighs its "low" resolution.

I know Nec monitors are really good as well, but I haven't found any Nec's in this price range that have appealed more to me than this Eizo monitor.

Do you think I should reconsider?
/johan

Robert - you are a man of few words! :-)

To me, 22" works fine. Is your point that a couple of hundred euros for a 4" larger screen is nothing to worry about because that larger screen have great benefits?

/johan

Yes Robert, it might be good value, but I think i will end up at a little lower price. And that NEC is more than 1545 in Norway.
Any who have experience with the Eizo Flexscan monitors or the Dell S-PVA or IPS monitors?

I have the Eizo CG241W & the L568 on my MacPro. The bigger CG301W got a very good review here : http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/two-displays.shtml

Wow! Would be nice. I'm not on a very limited budget, but that one is over..
Are you happy with the L568? I've been looking at a 24" Flexscan, at least it has 12 bit processing. Hopefully they are not getting worse than the older models.

It's painful, for the wallet, to read reviews like that... But thanks for the link!
/johan

Well, I only use the L568 in portrait orientation as the PS pallet monitor next to the 24" one :)
In LR I use it as secondary window : grid

The CG241W is a dream to work on but also not cheap (when I put my brand new 24" iMac - for use at the office - next to it I got a sudden rush of blood to my head because I momentarily thought I received a lemon, the difference is that big)

Done! Just ordered the HP 2475w Alexandre recommended. The Nec and Eizo was too expensive. So, will se if I regret..
The reviews I found on it was quite impressing for the price.

Please let me know how you find it Lars, if favourable then I'll be definately writing a letter to Father Christmas....

JP

Got the CG241W ,
simply a must for accurate printing yourself
but you must be aware that net browersers only uses sRGB,
so only for net a lot of ohther screens for less price will do indeed.
On the net you will find forums about these Eizo's struggeling with color-calibration in sRGB mode with Eye1,
a good video-cart helps a lot for this mode.(got the FX 1700)

You should absolutely consider getting a good monitor. I bought a Flexscan s2231w one year ago and I really like it. A totally different experience from what I was used too (but that was also a laptop screen..)
Anyway I think it's worth the money!

I found the HP actually was better than The Flexscans from Eizo. Not mentioning the Coloredges.. They are hard to beat, but would cost nearly 3 times as much as the HP. The HP has an IPS panel, so it should be quite ok.


Yeah, you have a good monitor there, but out of question for me at the moment. Spent too much lately, New Epson 7900SP, and waiting for the new Nikons to come out too.

Not exactly, modern browsers are fully color managed, if needed via a plug-in.

Many don't know that. So I keep mine standard, jut to make sure I don't mistake and upload my Adobe RGB files. They really look sorry when displayed on SRGB displays.

I couldn't agree more with this, for the past week I've been viewing photos on a 2000euro Eizo monitor at work that is five times larger then the old laptop I normally use, its a completely different and rewarding experience, almost like constantly viewing huge prints of your work. Although everything looks frustratingly small at 950px.
This hobby is far too expensive. :(

Well, there are some monitors in between there..

Will report back about how my new one behaves as soon as I have it up and running. The most important is if I get some better correspondance between my monitor and that FANTASTIC Epson..
Will have to do another run on color management too.

Monitor in house today! HP LP2475w
The colors were very much off when I received it. All colors were originally set to 255 at manual adjustment "custom colors".
After calibration the red is still at 255 while green and blue are around 220.
I calibrate with a Spyder Pro, quite old calibrator. The new Spyder 3 is probably next on my shopping list.
The manual part of the calibration was easy to get right on the HP. I got the deviation at 314.223 compared to a desired 314.234! It's hard to hit better..

After calibrating I took up a few images in Photoshop to see what it looked like. Compared to my "old" Acer 22" it looks fantastic!
I can see absolutely no contrast shifts or color shifts within quite a lot more than normal viewing angles.

I tested some extreme angles just for fun. I can view it from more than 30 degrees angle looking down at it before it change appearance. To the sides it is even much better. At my Acer screen I had to be really careful to look right into it when adjusting pictures.

So my conclusion so far is, I've got a lot of monitor for my money!
Then we'll see how stable it is. It had been on for around 1 hour when I calibrated it. I'll run the calibrator again in a few days time and after a work session.

Lars, What luminousity do you run at? the cd/thingy2 value?

JP

Lacie electron19blue, used, in perfect condition: $11 from a friend who upgraded to flat panel. ViewSonic Professional Series P810, 21": $2 at a garage sale. I use them side-by-side and keep both calibrated using ColorVision Spider2 Pro (and they are pretty close--it's hard to say one is superior to the other). I use the ViewSonic for extra desktop space or looking at 1X.com images in full-screen mode, while doing critical Photoshop work on the Lacie.

$13 for a quality CRT setup (not counting the colorimeter) is something even I can afford.

Not at that computer now, but I think it was 237


Nothing like that to find out here in the islands..

I had a quite good CRT before, but threw it out. I didn't need a heater in the room.. I think it was a bit worn out too, very hard to calibrate. Then I wanted a larger panel. I've had an average 22" LCD for a while. Could not get the colors right, and a 22 wide is not really much more than a 19" 4-3 monitor to work on. The height is very much the same, so the only advantage is that you get some space to stack away the tools, and some more space on landscape format images.
Anyway, I'm happy with what I have now, but feel like you have beaten me seriously on price ..

Prices become relative if you get it for free as a present :)
but the ViewSonic is not that much mentionned although it has a very good colordepht, perfectly to calibrate also for printing.

I got the Spyder 3 pro today. Will run a new calibration on Friday when I'm home again. And I got a good look at some Eizo 24 color edges today, fantastic! Will try to turn down luminosity on my screen and see how it calibrates then. The Eizo's has a specified luminosity of 300, very much like my HP, but might of course run better at 80 for photo. It will be interesting to see how the HP behave.

Calibrated the monitor with the new Spyder Pro today. I also took the luminosity down a lot. 98 was the lowest I got it. It looks like the monitor function very well with the low luminosity too.
A print is just coming out of the printer. A canvas at well above 1m length. It looks exactly like it looked at the screen! Fantastic! Finally in control it seems.
The profile used was downloaded for free from Breathing Color, the maker of the canvas.
So, I'm so far very satisfied with my HP monitor.

Excellent Lars, glad you are getting there. I may treat myself to the HP monitor soon but I've got my eye on a 500mm zoom lens first.

JP

Ahhhh, I see John is getting interested in all those critters he sees on his daily run...

How observant of you Clyde but truth be none I'm becoming far too sedate these days and what better way to spend an hour or two than on one's backside in a hide waiting for subjects coming to you instead of going to them..
:-)


Actually I'm entering mid-life very ungraciously and still trying to run up and down mountains as if I was still 17, it can look ungainly and decidedly ugly on occasion.

JP

Well, if you can afford it, look at the Eizo. It just looks fantastic! The HP is probably not good enough for real critical work. My calibration result ended up at 6496K, so well. But I think I can see some red shine on hard white lines at b&w. When displaying photos it looks great.

Don't buy a zoom! I have a 500 f4.0 that I bought secondhand for a fifth of a new one.

I think he's getting lazy.. :-) with a 500 you don't need to run that far!


See!
Many are so impressed by the photographers sitting in hides for hours and days.. I think about it as laziness taken to the extreme.. :-)

When authors do confabulate
Their threads tend to deteriorate.

Arh yes King, perhaps the light hearted chat has gone off course a wee bit, lenses for another discussion, back on track then:

Lars, I think the HP will suit me absolutely fine and doubt a more expensive one will benefit me, I don't consider my processing or image interrogation to be really super critical.

:-)
JP

...but I *love* meandering conversations.

I had to look up that word in a dictionary..

Ummm...mind telling me what it means?

Here's what I got:
psychiatry, psychological medicine, psychopathology - the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders
cook up, fabricate, invent, manufacture, make up - make up something artificial or untrue

I like especially the one about mental disorders..

Finally we are far away from all that monitor talk!

Hillbilly dictionary only has A's and B's, no C's...

What about "Hatfields" and "McCoys"? I suppose every hillbilly child is taught all they need to know about that from birth.

Hey now come on boys, less of the casual talk, chat, confabulation and discuss the topic at hand please.

I looked it up as well, I'm gonna baffle folk at work with that one...

;-)

The topic at hand is kaput.

I don't remember if we discussed "monitors for printing" vs. "monitors for World Wide Web viewing." Did we discuss standard Windows gamma vs. standard Apple gamma?

Monitors are important, I've always thought so, but much less important if one is not preparing images for the Heidelberg printing press and matching colors. These days, too, size matters.

Is there a notebook computer that has a top-notch display for editing and viewing photographs?

The new MacBook Pro LED monitor has good resolution for printing and for surfing. Compares well with my mate's Eizo.

King, when has size not mattered?? If I hear, "My God I didn't know it was gonna be that big" one more time...

(That, BTW, was what my wife said when I brought home my first 20" Sony CRT)

I doubt very seriously that you would want to do much serious photo editing on any laptop, although I have not seen the one Jan refers to. I use a 17" macbook pro when out on location for promo shoots. It is totally unacceptable imo for anything that counts for color or fine detail. My mac at work has 2 24" Cinema displays and my home PC has one 20" viewsonic. All are 16x9 aspect ratio. On my home computer the x size is fine, but I really miss the y space. For me 1920x1680 screen resolution is a must. I am looking very hard at the HP talked about above, just need to find an extra $500 laying around.

Yep, agree here King and that is why I'll go for the HP as mentioned instead of a more expensive model.

As for my laptop, I had a devil of a job getting a decent matte, non reflective screen for. I bought a new Dell 17" laptop for work and travelling with the intention to edit some images on whilst away from home, easier on marital harmony I find however, it came with a horrendous shiny, glossy reflective screen that all it was good for was mirroring my contorted face in. (I didn't realise this when I bought it as naievely I thought all computer screens were matte but it seems these days manufacturers prefer glossy screens as it aids sales when they are being displayed in shops, apparently the general computer buying public are attracted to shiny things as opposed to dull things - all marketting I've been told)

Eventually I sourecd a replacement matte screen, Dell couldn't provide one but it is of poor quality when compared to even my cheap home Dell monitor. Still, I've had a few images published that have been processed on it so I'm fairly content with it.

:-)

JP

What I was looking for was a monitor for printing, mainly for printing on the Epson 7900, and it works fine. I get exactly the same colors on print as I have on the screen. Occasionally I do some projects for printing, don't know if its on Heidelberg, but have done some photo cards. Usually I make 1500 pieces, so it is nice to know what I will get back..


The last laptop I had that could be used for photo editing was a high class IBM, now Lenovo. I think they still have some good monitors, but you'll have to go for the expensive ones.