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Narrowing The Choices Shopping around in April 2008, it appeared that there were four available panels that would fill the bill. They are listed below in order of ascending price.
The NEC and the EIZO offered more sophisticated electronics to go with the LCD panel. Specifically, 10 or 12 bit look up tables for the DAC's that drive the display, and temperature compensated analog electronics that would make warm up and temperature drift less of an issue. In the end, after talking to some early adopters and testers, I went with the HP LP3065 and saved enough money to buy a pretty nice lens. Did this extra sophistication matter? More on that subject later. The Beast Arrives The most amazing thing about the any of the 30" LCD panels is simply their size. I thought I knew what to expect, as had used my 21.3" Eizo for some time, but the physical reality of the beast is impressive. The usual response from friends is "wow, it's huge".
Seeing is Believing After setup, I began to proof some new client images, and make prints on our Epson 9880. The profiles for our Epson 9880 were made with the same Gretag Macbeth spectrometer used to profile the display. I was amazed at how spot on the prints were to the displayed image, especially the B&W ones. I was used to good results with my Eizo, but never were they this close. Was this all my imagination, or was there some factual evidence to corroborate what my eyes were telling me? I talked to my good friend Norman Koren, author of Imatest and Gamutvision. He had been talking to Jarred Walton at anandtech.com. Jarred had done some analysis of the current crop of 24", 27" and 30" LCD displays. He used Gamutvision and a fairly good colorimeter to measure both the color gamut and delta E of these displays. I could look at some hard data to see if my eyes were indeed on to something. The bar graphs below are displayed courtesey of anandtech.com.
The bar graph on the left shows the measured color gamut of the display as a percent of the AdobeRGB color space. Jared's measurement of the HP LP3065 gammut agreed with my own, a gamut of about 91%. The Dell 3007WFP is not the same as the Dell 3007WFP_HC which uses the newer LCD panel. You can clearly see the improved color gamut of the new generation, high end LCD flat panels. The graph on the right shows the average delta E of a selection of colors from the displays tested. Delta E is a measure of how close a displayed color is to the actual color it represents. A Delta E match of less than 1.0 means even a highly trained observer, under ideal conditions cannot detect a difference. On average the HP LP3065 after calibration was spot on! I wasn't seeing things. The high end, latest generation LCD displays have made great strides forward in the last year. I'm guessing that any of the displays shown above, with a gamut close to Adobe RGB and a Delta E of about 1 or less would be excellent candidates for photo editing, when properly setup and calibrated. Screen backlight bleed on this LCD is basically nonexistent when calibrated for printing. I filled the screen with black in Photoshop. Black, as defined in my calibration, was about 0.4 nits (cd/m²). I took my Eye-1 and using the Eye-1 Share software measured various blacks around the screen. The Eye-1 share software rounds up to the nearest whole number. I got values between 1 and 2 nits (cd/m²). Truly remarkable, my old Eizo varied from between 1 to 12 nits (cd/m²). Black is black on this puppy!
Viewing angle is superb. There's basically no color shift from ±45 degrees left/right or up/down off axis. I can have a client sit next to me and do final proofing with no problems. See the actual screen shot above. Closing Thoughts Is the HP LP3065 the perfect photo editing display? Of course not, it has some definite shortcomings. It can't scale different video resolutions. This might be a problem if you had to run it off the DVI output of a notebook computer as some people might like to do. In that light, it also has no analog inputs, DVI input only please. If you need to see highly accurate sRGB, 6500K web colors, as well as accurate print color, it's not for you. You cannot change the color space or color temperature via the on screen menus. In fact, there are no onscreen menus at all. The front panel only has a brightness control and video input select button. If you had to frequently switch between color spaces and color temperatures, the Eizo SX3031 or NEC LCD3090 might be a far better choice, at a considerable jump in price of course. Finally, it doesn't have 10 or 12 bit look up tables (LUT's) for its' DAC's . This would matter if you never calibrated the display, but after calibration with a good spectrometer, it doesn't matter. Look at the calibrated Delta E table above. The Lacie 324 is the only display with a 10 bit LUT. It has on average, after calibration, less accurate color than five of the displays with 8 bit LUT's. How can that be? It's becuase pure theory often doesn't jive with the realities of mass produced electronic devices. In my opinion, non linearities in the color response of the panels, their closely coupled analog amplifiers and the LUT's in the video card itself can combine to overwhelm the advantages of the vaunted 10 or 12 bit LUT's. Welcome to the real world as one of my old college profs used to say! Warmup time is my only minor gripe. The LP3065 takes about 20-25 minutes to warm up to a color stable editing state. My old EIzo was there in 2 to 3 minutes. The new Eizo and NEC also seem to have temperature compensated electronics which should warm up and stabilize rather quickly. That's it in a nutshell. If you LCD display is more than a year old, you might want to consider the HP LP3065 or one of it's new brethren. The times in the display world, they are a changin.
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