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In Search of LCD Nirvana A Review of the HP LP3065 30" LCD display by Miles Hecker Introduction Some people spend a lot of time blogging. Some people spend a lot of time on cell phones. I don't fit into either of those categories. I do spend a lot of time sitting in front of my computer display, working in Photoshop on images. Some of the images are mine, many of them are for clients. Lately I have been doing a lot of work making big, 32"x40" & larger prints, from scans of 8"X10" large format film. In this type of work, a 16"x20" print is a proof print. Little visual problems, a dust spot, a water mark, a halo where a sky has been darkened against the backdrop of a mountain range, tend to reach out and bite you in a 32"x40" print. Re-editing and reprinting to fix the problems are time consuming and expensive. In this light, I set out on my latest quest. A quest for the best possible LCD display for editing and proofing large images in Photoshop. Background I started editing images in Photoshop back in 1998. Back then all the digital images I worked on were scans of various films. At first they were drum scans. Drum scans were followed by scans from my Polaroid CCD scanner. I had a seemingly wonderful EIZO 17" CRT to edit on. Its real viewable area was probably less than 16" diagonal. The EIZO was replaced by a 19" Sony CRT in 2001. In those olden days of computing, LCD monitors, while great for office work, were sorely lacking for image editing. I purchased my first LCD monitor in 2004. It was an EIZO L985. Its 21.3" viewing area seemed huge. Its 1600x1200 pixels and superb fine detail were outstanding. It even calibrated very well with my Eye One colorimeter. Its deep blacks were somewhat crunched together and left something to be desired, but you can't have everything I thought. You could proof about a 12.5"x16" print full size on the screen of that L985, not bad at all. I rarely made prints of more than 20"x30" in size, so I was satisfied. More recently, as 32"x40" prints became the norm, I quickly realized it was hard to evaluate their tonal subtleties and color on what now seemed like a smallish 21.3" screen. I began to here the sirens call of the new 30" super displays . Alas, the quest had begun!
Gamutvision 3-D plot of Adobe RGB & sRGB colorspaces Technology Marches On It used to be that the most anyone could expect, in the way of a display color space, was the lowly sRGB gamut. It was enough of a challenge for CRT's to display this palette. The first LCD's of the 21st century could display it if you looked straight on. Move your head 30 degrees left, right, up or down and the colors changed drastically. By about 2004 things had gotten better. The viewing angle problems of early LCD panels had been vanquished, at least in the better quality, premium displays. It turns out sRGB was a poor compromise. Many relatively common colors had to be shoe horned into its gamut. Photoshop and its AdobeRGB color space beckoned. Some people now use prophoto RGB as a working colorspace. Personally, I find it unnecessary and not worth the bother 99% of the time. Without discussing the reasons, I find 99% of the photos I shoot have colors that fit nicely into the Adobe RGB space and that's what I work in. The technology needed to display Adobe RGB made it into production in late 2006. The newer S-PVA and S-IPS type LCD panels could display from 92%-99% of the Adobe RGB color palette. Of these two types, the S-IPS panels had on average a slightly smaller palette, but had a greater accuracy in color rendition. They would be the display of choice for the new generation of 30", color accurate, Adobe RGB, super LCD displays.
The Road to Nirvana If I was going to find the best possible LCD display I had to outline my list of priorities for such a device. In descending order of importance, they went something like this. 1. Size, about 30" measured diagonally in widescreen format. A proof of a 16"x24" print at full size is possible on a screen this big. 2. Color gamut, greater than sRGB, 90% or more of Adobe RGB being the end goal. 3. Color accuracy, a delta E of 1.0 or less after monitor calibration . 4. Screen backlight bleed, as little as possible. I edit quite a few B&W images that are very dark in places. 5. Warm up time, as little as possible. My Eizo L985 would warm up in an amazingly short 2 minutes or so. 6. Cost, as reasonable as possible. It would be nice to keep this to under $1500.
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