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Archive 2016 · Calibrated monitors for photography vs. daily use?

  
 
slrl0ver
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Calibrated monitors for photography vs. daily use?


All,

Do you use separate monitors for "daily" use vs. photography? If not, how do you handle working with "dim" displays which are appropriate for printing (90-100 cd/m^2)? Do you switch to a different brightness levels when not image editing?

I'm looking for bigger monitors and simultaneously want to get back into photography, which includes making prints. Previously when I calibrated my display, I set the brightness to 100 cd/m^2 so prints wouldn't be too dark. Unfortunately that made my daily usage painful as the displays simply looked very dull.

- slrl0ver




Aug 12, 2016 at 06:52 AM
mhayes5254
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Calibrated monitors for photography vs. daily use?


My first thought is to wonder if your ambient lighting is too bright? I have a large generic monitor at work and a good calibrated monitor at home and while the home monitor is not as bright, I never felt it was a problem. The ambient light levels at work are also brighter than at home..


Aug 12, 2016 at 07:17 AM
Alan321
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Calibrated monitors for photography vs. daily use?


It depends a lot on what you are viewing because some programs are basically all white with some black text while others are more civilised.

Somewhere about 90-100 Cd/m2 suits my prints well because I usually see them indoors at night. It suits Excel and Word documents too. However, something like 120-140 Cd/m2 makes photos look better on-screen.

I use the same monitor for everything but I can change the brightness and colour management settings with a single command because the smarts are built into the monitor and so do not necessarily rely on the graphics card for colour settings and computer or monitor controls for brightness. Mine is a Dell UP2414Q (24", 4k). NEC and Eizo do it even better because they allow more than two colour/brightness combinations to be selected as a combination, and they have other features, but they cost more too.


Decide whether you really want bigger monitors because of the physical size you want to look at, or just because you want more pixels to look at. These days you can choose monitors from a significant range of pixels per inch as well physical sizes, whereas not so long ago getting a physically bigger monitor was the only way to get more pixels because nearly all monitors had about 90-110ppi. I prefer a 24" 4k monitor at about 185ppi because:
- bigger sizes are harder to cope with (especially when wearing glasses and having a limited focus range),
- lower ppi looks too chunky, and
- higher ppi makes images and other things in Windows look a bit too small.

Some people enjoy being at the front row of a cinema and might just as well enjoy using 27-32" monitors, but I don't.

- Alan



Aug 12, 2016 at 08:28 AM
tarzan1234
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Calibrated monitors for photography vs. daily use?


slrl0ver wrote:
All,

Do you use separate monitors for "daily" use vs. photography? If not, how do you handle working with "dim" displays which are appropriate for printing (90-100 cd/m^2)? Do you switch to a different brightness levels when not image editing?

I'm looking for bigger monitors and simultaneously want to get back into photography, which includes making prints. Previously when I calibrated my display, I set the brightness to 100 cd/m^2 so prints wouldn't be too dark. Unfortunately that made my daily usage painful as the displays simply looked very dull.

- slrl0ver




I calibrated my display to 100cd/m2 and 5750K to get a good visual print match for the paper I use most often under my print viewing condition (Solux light, 5000K). I keep my room pretty dark so I don't really have any problem with doing other stuff under the same condition. However, I do prefer browsing the web and doing other stuff with a little brighter and cooler screen (120-140cd/m2, 6500K) so I created several calibration profiles and switch among them for different purposes. I also have a sRGB emulation mode for sRGB only applications. I use an NEC PA272 with NEC Spectraview software. Because the NEC software communicates directly with the display hardware so I only need to create a new profile set the targets. Once calibrated, I can select any of those profiles, the NEC software will bring the display to the calibrated parameters.

I believe you will need a display with hardware calibration capability to do this. Any of the NEC PA series screen with NEC software and I'm sure the Eizo ColorEdge line of displays have this capability. More affordable offerings from Dell or Asus appear to have hardware calibration capability but I'm not sure about the proprietary software you will need to calibrate the display's hardware. I remember a couple of years ago Dell advertised one of their UltraSharp PremierColor as "hardware calibration capable" but didn't have any software to drive it. I hope the situation has changed. You may want to look into that. Without proper software, the hardware calibration capability with internal LUT is pretty much useless.



Aug 12, 2016 at 11:06 AM





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