LCD vs LED Monitors

[SCraig]

Well there is still one reason to change. By forcing a colour temperature that is not native onto a monitor which doesn't have something fancy like an internal 12bit colour lookup table, you actually end up retarding the output of your video card slightly. The closer your screen is to native white balance the better it will perform.

- If you have a lot of natural light in the room stick with 6500k
- If you have a dark room I suggest that you try calibrating to 5500k, this will be closer to native for your LCDs and they may match each other better. Remember when you initially calibrate they will look a bit yellow but give it a minute or two for your eyes to adjust.

The 6500k recommendation is a throwback to the CRT days which had colour temperature naturally that high. Personally I calibrate my monitor by measuring the native white balance which will likely have a significant Delta E (green or purple cast) and calibrate back to whatever the default white balance was. It probably makes little difference, but I take the view of why not let your gear perform as best it can .

There is zero natural light in here. The curtains and miniblinds are behind a bunch of stuff that makes them hard to get to and I'm lazy

The Spyder I use with my Samsung states that the ambient light is low and recommends 5800K. The colorimeter for my NEC states that the ambient light is high and recommends 6500. If natural daylight is "Bright" then I would certainly classify this dungeon as "Dark".

I haven't tried 5800 on the NEC but I have on the Samsung and it looked really warm. I've got them both at 6500 right now and they are really close to each other as far as just Windows dialogs look. I'm doing all my editing on the NEC now and just want the Samsung to match closely enough that when I move a window from one monitor to the other I don't see a huge color shift.

I can set the i! colorimeter for the NEC to 5500 but I can't set the Spyder to 5500. The only three choices on it are 6500, 5800, and Native. I can't find the value for "Native" in the specs but I can get the Spyder software to tell me during the calibration. I'll play around with it some on Monday. If I don't like it I can get back to this pretty easily.

 

[Cruzingoose]

I know the phosphors did not physically overlap, the color spectrum reproduced indeed does, making a more continuous viewable spectrum.

A more continuously viewable spectrum means poor colours. The key here is the colour gamut is defined by the relative amplitudes of the peaks of colour and how little overlap there is with adjacent peaks. Two screens which both conform to the sRGB gamut (which is 99.9% of all LCDs and CRTs on the market) have incredibly similar spectral output from each of the red green and blue filters. This is how they get their defined gamut. A wide gamut monitor on the other hand has less overlap, and an OLED screen has effectively zero. The ability to generate colours is made up of a triangle between the 3 primary points. The closer these points lie to the edge the more of the visible colour spectrum can be reproduced. With 3 points we can cover nearly all of the space between red green and blue, with an inability to produce only a pure cyan.

The spectrum of CRTs and LCDs are essentially the same.
The spectrum of CRTs and sRGB LCDs are both piss poor in terms of ability to produce the visible spectrum.
There are more, affordable, wide gamut LCDs, and LCDs can also be made as a wider gamut then CRTs, so I'm not sure why you think this is a good point for CRTs.[/QUOTE]

>>>>This link will go into the details of CRT and LCD displays, good info. Digital Photography - Marcel Patek: LCD Displays - liquid crystals - gamut - phosphors - polarization

>>>> So, to be the "perfect" display device, there should be NO overlap and wide separation of the primary colors? (AMOLED) I've believed that fluro tubes are awfull at reproducing color because the color and amplitude of the phosphors are unable to produce a continuous spectrum of light. White LEDS are not able to produce a pure spectrum of color either. I imagine the final say in the matter is the video card's ability to address and remap the display's weakness while still being able to reproduce the widest gamut of color.

 

[Garbz]

The phosphor is only part of the equation. Given an unequal spectrum of light filters can be designed to compensate and correct for the peaks and dips in the light source. This is how wide gamut monitors achieve their wide gamuts despite still using CCFLs or LEDs as their backlight. Phosphors can also be mixed and matched to produce a variety of peaks and that can be seen in some of the horrendous light cheap fluros give off. The important part is that when a display shows white we are not actually seeing the light source, we're seeing the combination of the light source through a matched red, green and blue filter.

The wide gamut is a function of how good these filters are. The video card, or rather the display driver since in reality you don't want the computer's video card to compensate anything at all, can really only make colour corrections between the gamut points defined by these filters, and not make the gamut any wider. It is very much an opto/electrical problem rather than one that can be fixed by software.

 

[Z06Nut]

So now to simplify things.

With all that (above) being said:

What would you buy if money was no object?
What would you buy if you had a $1000 budget?
What would you buy if you had a $600 budget?
What would you buy if you had a $300 budget?

 

[unpopular]

Hell. If money were no object I'd have a high resolution full color e-ink display built for me custom with a Wacom tablet integrated and an xRite spectrodensitometer. It might cost $2 million, but it would be AWESOME!

 

[Cruzingoose]

Well, after all that education and $300 budget, I'll wait until my tube fails then start looking at 17-20" class AMOLED or OLED display.

 

[Garbz]

So now to simplify things.

With all that (above) being said:

What would you buy if money was no object?
What would you buy if you had a $1000 budget?
What would you buy if you had a $600 budget?
What would you buy if you had a $300 budget?

1) Top of the line NEC or Eizo display with ultra wide colour gamut, IPS panel, 14bit lookup table.
2) The display I have now, a 26" NEC Spectraview, except the MkII model
3) One of the cheaper NEC or Eizo displays with an emphasis on IPS technology, but no colour lookup table, wide gamut, or extreme size.
4) Dell UltraSharp U2312HM

Hell. If money were no object I'd have a high resolution full color e-ink display built for me custom with a Wacom tablet integrated and an xRite spectrodensitometer. It might cost $2 million, but it would be AWESOME!

At risk of sounding perpetually disagreeable, e-ink can currently produce only 4096 colours. Combined with the horrendously slow update rate you may want to give this a pass for photography work

Well, after all that education and $300 budget, I'll wait until my tube fails then start looking at 17-20" class AMOLED or OLED display.

I hope your tube lasts a while. Sony's XEL-1 OLED TV is only 11" and costs $3k I expect several years will still pass before OLED displays at TV sizes become economical.

 

[Cruzingoose]

Well, after all that education and $300 budget, I'll wait until my tube fails then start looking at 17-20" class AMOLED or OLED display.

I hope your tube lasts a while. Sony's XEL-1 OLED TV is only 11" and costs $3k I expect several years will still pass before OLED displays at TV sizes become economical.[/QUOTE]

Being somewhat sour on flat screens, I've collected "for free" several 17-19 inch tubes to last a long time. In a few years, that Sony monitor will be $500 and the 20 inch version will be $2k. Then I'll buy the used Sony for $200.