New LCD Monitor

[John Rofrano]

[Matt Smitherz] “I am after a new monitor on the 23″ range.”

I’ve got 2 of these: ASUS ProArt PA246Q (24″ 1920×1200) and I’m really happy with them. The colors are really accurate right out of the box.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dave Haynie]

While quality tends to scale with price, it’s not always an absolute.

I don’t have specific models to recommend, but some caveats. For one, realize that most of the lower cost monitors are built from digital television LCD panels. The advantage is obvious: you’re going to edit video on the same kind of device that people will view it on.

The disadvantages not so obvious… these things are kind of bad for video. The good news is that all modern panels are plenty fast enough even for 60p video; many are actually refreshed at 120p or even 240p (I’m kind of skeptical on 240p being a real refresh rate rather than a marketing refresh rate). The average panel is based on TN (twisted nematic) LCD technology, which is, unfortunately, the worst kind. The native contrast ratio of the panel may only be in the 800:1 to 1000:1 range, you may find a real color range of only 6 bits per pixel, and colors may vary greatly from one panel to the next, or even over time and temperature.

You can tell the monitor panel was designed for television if the resolution is 1920×1080. There’s a story here. When HDTV was being created, all the specs being agreed upon, there were two powerful camps involved: the film industry and the computer industry. The film people wanted a 2:1 aspect ratio set as the HDTV standard; the computer industry, happy enough with 4:3 as it was, wanted 16:10. So they agreed on 16:9 as the compromise for HDTV, since even back then, everyone talked about “digital convergence”. Naturally, the PC industry went right on to make 16:10 displays anyway.. for awhile. Eventually, though, the economic weight of consumer electronics had everyone go to the 16:9 format for all cheap displays, simply because the PC and the TV display had pretty much become the same thing. This is slightly annoying, though, if you had 1600×1200 screens in the analog world… one reason I bought early enough to get 1920×1200 for my displays.

You can pretty easily spot a TN display… the display fades or complete disappears as you try to view it from off-center. The other display technologies I’ll mention can pretty much be viewed on-edge without losing brightness. This is actually not that big of a deal when you’re talking about monitors, since you nearly always view straight on, but it’s something to mention.

Some of that’s mitigated, for video, by “dynamic contrast”… the monitor isn’t just varying the LCD pixels, but zone-based backlighting (so-called LED monitors), where the backlight is also used dynamically, in concert with the LCD pixels. This is actually pretty good for video, totally useless for computer-type information displays.

I strongly recommend MVA/PVA (or one of the other variations of “Vertical Alignment” panels), or IPS (and the other variations of in-plance switching panels). There are just other ways of making an LCD panel, but they have superior characteristics. MVA and its ilk delivers at 8-bit color, and that color is far more stable. You can look up detailed reviews on most monitors, and a good review will give that monitor’s gamut as a precentage of the sRGB (standard computer color space) or NTSC color space covered.

Note: the NTSC color space is NOT the gamut of NTSC broadcast television.. it’s an estimate of the range all colors seen by the average human… it’s the widest color space typically quoted. sRGB covers about 72% of the NTSC color space, most CRTs and TVs cover about 70% of the NTSC color space (for more than you could possibly want to know about color in film and video, go here: https://www.theasc.com/magazine/jan05/conundrum/page1.html).

Probably the overall best is IPS, and as a result, it’s kind of squeezed MVA out of the market (I’m sitting in front of two 1920×1280 MVA monitors — love ’em). When I bought my monitors, IPS displays in this size were usually around $800, and they had this weird motion effect that made them, IMHO, unusable for video (it’s the Photo editing world that first pushed for IPS, since you can actually get IPS monitors with deep, better-than-CRT color gamut and resolution… for a price). They seem to have fixed that, and the prices have fallen.

And you can trust your eyes, too… kind of. No one’s going to have their monitors calibrated in the average store, but you can at least play around with the settings. Bring some reference images, some video, etc. and ensure that the display looks good, before you buy.

As for specific models, recommendations are hard, because what we like on-screen can be pretty personal. Some people get angry over one thing I don’t care about.. for example, the Westinghouse monitors I have got bad reviews because the controls are terrible. And they are some of the worst-designed controls ever… but how often do I need them? But if that were important to you, you’d hate these monitors. I bought for the MVA panel, and the fact I could hook HDMI, YPrPb, Y/C, or CVBS directly to the monitors… every camcorder I had ever owned could be directly connected, several even at once 🙂

I’d at least take a look at the ASUS ML249H. That’s an MVA panel, only 1920×1080, with dynamic LED backlighting, and you can find these for $199. LG and Viewsonic both have IPS displays in the $200-$300 range… I might check out the LG IPS231P too. In general, you can get a better color gamut with LED backlight rather than CCFL, not to mention the potential for dynamic backlighting on video and other natural images.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yup.. those are IPS, pretty nice. I didn’t mention the Adobe RGB color space in my long article. Adobe created their own color space largely to deal with photo printing. Most inkjet printers use CMYK (K = black) printing, and these days, several levels of C, M, even Y sometimes. The basic idea is that printers deliver a wider color space than the sRGB color space prevalent in much of the computer industry.

John’s monitors cover 98% of the Adobe RGB color space. Adobe RGB covers about 94% of the NTSC color space. Short answer here: very good color for a monitor.

-Dave

[Matt Smitherz]

Thank to both John & Dave.

I was not aware of MVA technology, heard only about TS & IPS.

I thought IPS was an overkill but re-considering I could also use it for pictures.

I live in Taiwan, thus I will go most probably for an Asus (Either MVA or IPS).

Cheers.

[Malcolm Matusky]

I have one display on my VP11 system and am thinking of getting another, I have a dual head graphics card, but would I be better off getting a HDTV and a blackmagic card to feed component in through an HDMI port to give me a more “video”look than a computer display?

I make industrial films, no broadcast, so I’m not in the market for a broadcast reference monitor. I can either get another computer panel, IPS etc, or go with a HDTV roughly the same size. Most of my work goes to the web, so I have been OK to date with the sRGB panel I have, calibrated with a Spyder3 to sRGB for internet delivery.

What are my options (on the low end financially) another slightly better quality computer display ISP etc to get closer to RGB/NTSC, or a HDTV with a $200 blackmagic box. Or is there a way to “soft proof” REC.709 on a computer display?

Color management and displays seem to be a bit of alchemy and science from all the post I have read recently.

Thanks’

Malcolm

Malcolm
http://www.malcolmproductions.com

[Malcolm Matusky]

I recently downloaded dispcalGUI with Argyll to test with my Spyder3; there are options for rec.709 & sRGB profiles, very time consuming package to create a calibration but making profiles is short. The first calibration took 2 hours! Profiles under 5 minutes.

Do the profiles effectively create a “soft proof”? for REC.709, not enough documentation, that I have found, yet to answer my question.

This software has many more parameters than the DataColor package that I have, interesting package.

M

Malcolm
http://www.malcolmproductions.com

[Malcolm Matusky]

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/223/18184#18340

Interesting thread on color.

Malcolm
http://www.malcolmproductions.com

[Malcolm Matusky]

https://www.curtpalme.com/ChromaPure.shtm

Does anyone have experience with products like this? Looks interesting for calibrating HDTV display.

M

Malcolm
http://www.malcolmproductions.com

[John Rofrano]

I would just get a good IPS panel that’s at least 1920×1200.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Malcolm Matusky]

Thank’s John,

Are you grading your work for web delivery or REC.709? The monitors you are running look great for web, but would you use another method for grading REC.709 for Blueray/dvd delivery?

Regards,

M

Malcolm
http://www.malcolmproductions.com