What about your monitor?

Recently my monitor, much used and loved, decided that it had lived for long enough and died.

This wasn't the first time it had done this, but it will be the last. A couple of years ago it decided to fade away almost overnight. I managed to repair it though using some parts sourced from the USA. I think it was so shocked at being operated on, that it has performed flawlessly ever since. Until recently that is.

By the way, I am not suggesting that you open up the back of your monitor or perform repairs on any electronic equipment. They contain lethal voltages and nasty currents that shouldn't be fiddled with (I have extensive experience in this type of repair).

Anyway, the monitor didn't just explode or anything dramatic like that, it just slowly faded away over a period of weeks. At the end I was having to create and check an ICC profile for the monitor before every print run to ensure that I was not compromising customer's prints (or my own).

Getting a little sick of this, I surveyed the latest monitor scene (surfed the Internet) and confirmed my choice of a new 26 inch NEC monitor with a wide colour gamut and barely reachable price. I then made the mistake of going down to see my local dealer and didn't end up purchasing the monitor I had selected. I talked to the friendly salesman and came home with a demo model NEC monitor, in the same family, but somewhat larger and much more expensive than my original selection.

I am very happy with the new monitor - an NEC Spectraview 3090.

Along the way I found out a few facts which I thought would be beneficial to other photographers.

Below is a diagram showing a representation of the sRGB colour space as compared to what our eyes can see.

sRGB versus CIE 1931 XYZ

The outside coloured shape is a representation of the CIE 1931 XYZ colour space (developed as a model of human colour vision), and the inside triangle is a representation of the sRGB colour space. The sRGB doesn't look so hot does it, when compared with our own visual colour gamut.

Well going on from this, below is a diagram showing a representation of the colour gamut of a typical colour ink-jet printer on standard satin finish photo paper versus the sRGB colour space.

sRGB versus Ink-Jet Printer

The new outlined shape is the colour gamut of the typical ink-jet print. Now we see that the sRGB colour space is not really very suitable for working with images intended for printing.

What has all this to do with monitors you ask. Well now let me show you a typical 2-3 year old colour LCD monitor versus the sRGB colour space.

sRGB versus standard LCD Monitor

In this case, the small coloured triangular shape is the LCD Monitor, the larger triangular shape being the sRGB colour space. Can you see an issue here with using typical (2-3 year old) colour LCD monitor for evaluating your photos? I can. As for printing - you would be really short changing yourself.

The good news is in the following diagram. Recently we purchased a couple of (different) cheaper LCD colour monitors for our children's computers. We noticed that the colours on these monitors looked better than on our older LCD monitors, so I created ICC profiles for them to see.

The diagram below shows the two new cheap LCD colour monitor colour gamuts versus, again, the sRGB colour space.

sRGB versus recent LCD Monitor

In this case the solid colour shapes are the recent LCD colour monitors (they are almost exactly the same) and the outline is the sRGB colour space. As you can see, the monitors are a close match for sRGB, which is a lot better than the older monitor shown above.

If you are using a "standard" colour LCD monitor for viewing or editing your images, maybe you should consider updating it to a more recent model. These are not expensive monitors, if fact they are the cheapest ones I could find that gave a decent image (around $200.00 Australian). It is also important, of course, to profile your monitor if you are editing images, printing them or sending them out to print.

As I mentioned above the sRGB colour space is still a very reduced colour space when compared with an ink-jet printer on gloss/satin photo paper. If you want to take advantage of the increased gamut available when printing your images, I suggest you use the Adobe1998 colour space which more closely matches ink-jet printers. You can also buy monitors that closely match the Adobe1998 colour space - but they will cost you significantly more ($1000.00 - $2000.00 Australian). Some of the monitors I recommend are the NEC wide gamut monitors and EIZO monitors.

May 2010.