Update (Aug 2010)

My current favorite monitor for photo editing is the excellent HP ZR24W, you should also read my subjective review on that monitor.

The big guys

  1. Buy an Eizo if you can.
  2. Buy a NEC / Lacie / Apple if you can’t do #1. [Lacie is rebranded NEC and $400 more expensive]

For the rest of us, continue reading.

Find the panel

Find out the model you are in interested in and go here.
For instance,

  • Samsung 205BW (widescreen) has a 20 inch 6 ms TN panel.
  • Dell 2007FPW (widescreen) has a 20 inch 8 ms (g2g) S-IPS (LG.Philips LM201W01) panel.
  • Samsung 215TW (widescreen) has a 21 inch 8 ms (g2g) S-PVA (Samsung LTM210M2) panel.

Picking the panel

  • TN panel – fast response, 6 bit colors, BAD for photo processing. It has only 226,000 odd colors and it simulates the other 16.7 m colors. Don’t touch it with a 10 feet pole for photo editing. Trust me on that. I bought a Samsung 204B and without running any tests, I could see banding in the color gradients. Opening up a standard test chart tells the truth.
  • S-IPS – probably the best for photo editing, 8 bit per channel. True 16.7 m colors, great for photo editing, but slow response times. Usually the monitor is $150-$200 more than a comparative TN panel.
  • S-PVA – opinion is split on how good S-PVA is. Some argue [quoting websites written in 2004 that S-IPS rules]. However, the rolls royce of LCD monitors, Eizo uses S-PVA.

Eizo CE210W (widescreen) has a 21 inch 8 ms (g2g) S-PVA (Samsung LTM210M2) panel.
Pick a S-PVA or S-IPS panel with true 8 bit / channel. In the same flatpanels.dk site, look at the tests link and see if your monitor is testing. PVA [not S-PVA, but an old variant] is supposed to be inferior.

You can learn danish to read the page or look for clues Wink. Look for 6 bit or 8 bit. If the colors say less than 16.7 million don’t touch it. If it says 16.7 million, then it is good.

About backlighting and other stuff

Not all panels are made the same. For instance, the Samsung 215tw and Eizo CE210W use the same panel, but they are like many hundred $ apart.
You are at the sole mercy of online reviews about this one.
For instance, the viewsonic WS monitors have S-IPS panels, but their backlight leak is bad compared to say Samsungs.

Find out about the manufacturer’s history

Some manufacturers change panels for the same monitor EACH production run. For instance, the Dell 2007FP has gone thru a S-IPS monitor and a S-PVA monitor, so what you buy may not be what you think you read.

http://aryarya.net/wassyoi/lcdmemo.html

Dell 2007FP = 20.1 inch 16 ms S-IPS (LG.Philips LM201U05) panel.

Dell 2007FP ver2 = 20.1 inch 16 ms S-PVA (Samsung LTM201U1) panel.
So, buy it in a store where you can return easily. [Costco rules]

Test your monitor

Once you get the monitor, run through some simple tests. I ran it through Ron Reznicks tools files from his ebook and run chkmon

http://www.ykwong.com/download.shtml
That hopefully will catch most of the problems.

So, what did I buy?

I bought a Samsung 215TW wide screen LCD monitor from Costco :) . Wide screen monitors are a bliss for photo editing.

Apple LCDs

If you want to buy an apple laptop for photo editing, you must read this first.

An excellent read

This thread is outstanding to learn about various monitor types.

A good list of LCD types

A good list of the type of LCD panels in monitors can be found here:

http://axofiber.no-ip.org/inside/monitor.lcd.panels.en.htm

Wide gamut monitors

I recently bought a Dell 2408 wide gamut monitor which has a wider color space closer to AdobeRGB, but it has its own problems, particularly with Mac OSX.

So much so that I strongly recommend against any wide gamut monitor unless Mac OSX fixes these problems. If you are using a wide gamut monitor with Mac OSX on anything other than color managed Firefox 3.1, you are going to see horribly saturated colors, useless for just about anything.

As noted above, my current favorite monitor to edit photos is the excellent HP ZR24W monitor, I used this monitor to replace my excellent iMac 27″ glossy monitor, which should say something.

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