New monitor game
14:39
After years of perfect servis my Iiyama CRT monitor gave up. Well, not compleelty but the screen doesn’t hold the shape anymore and flickering on corners is really indicating that the days of CRT
are over, at least for me. I was thinking about aquring new TFT LCD monitor for longer time. In last two weeks very actively.
At my daily job I work also with calibration of medical screens. We are using excellent 5MP monitors from BARCO and WIDE. Those are incredible 10-14bit resolution 21″ screens with 2560×2048 pixels.
At first I though I am going to setup nice 10bit per color system. I started from monitor and decided for either EIZO CE210W (PVA pannel) or NEC LCD2490UXi or LCD2090uXi (IPS pannel). And than next question was ok, but which graphics cards can give me 10bit per color. I was suprised when I realized than majority of common video card are still playing at 8bit/per color. I find out that from two major player Nvidia nad ATI, onl Quadro FX or FireGL lines are able to do this. Another nice advantage was that these cards can delivered Dual link output in DVI-D which makes possible to attach monitor with higher than 1600×1200 resolution. Looking at the prices I decided to go for ATI FireGL V3600.
The next step was, hey I do use a Picture Window Pro, how many color per channel it is using for display? I know that pwp is using 16bit per color when doing all the operations, but display is something else. The direct Win32API is using only 8bit per color, one need to use HDR for DirectX or OpenGL inetrfaces. PWP is not doing that, so here my attempt to make 10bit workflow ends. I am not sure about PhotoShop, somewhere I saw mentioned that it can do more than 8bit color on screen, but I am not sure.
Anyway, using this FireGL card require PC with PCI-Express 16 which I do not have on my current computer. So I would need to aquire new one, which, if I build it myself with 4GB RAM and decent Inter Core CPU will costs me around 500 euro. So I started to look for another options.
I decided to look for decent TFT monitor, decent means the one which is possible to calibrate, whcih has the most uniform lighting The one whcih has small pixels (around 0.25mm) and which is not very expensive. I would love to have one of the NEC or EIZO but prices close to € 1000 are for me not realistic. Only one would be LCD2090UXi, (€650) and that has excellent 0.255mm and 100dpi resolution with 1600×1200 pixels on 4:3 screen. But that was only one to two inch bigger screen that what I have now. So I strt to search and compare. I certinaly would love to have IPS pannel, but some PVA pannels are not bad either. I do not care about switching speed so 16ms no problem here. I have found info about new HP LP2475w.(€520) and it looks very good after calibration. Only the 24″ screen gave 0.27mm pixels, which coudn’t be really the bad for my eyes. Seems like grary level can be nicely calibrated and smooth.
After more searching I find interesting monitor Lenovo l220x which is 22inch monitor with resolution 1920×1200 and there fore 0.25mm pixels. The reviews I have read agree on the two facts this PVA pannel monitor has a good quality of back light, it is just too bright. It is possible to calibrate it but Brightness needs to be down to zero than is possible to get 140cd/m^2. This monitor is priced very nicely at €390. It is al;ways very difficult to base decision on review, esspecialy when it is only one or two. I have read that this monitor has slite banding in grey section. Now what? If this is real than monitor is not for me (black and white photogrpahy is all about grey levels) but paying 520 for HP2475W hm, hm,…
And the last option which no reviews has been found by me so far, but base on information is IPS pannel, 24″, 1920×1200. So there certainly is potencial esspecialy when price is now around €450..
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