The right screen for photographers

Apple has never been interested in supplying professional screens to its designer/photographer client base – the original core of its success. It’s a shame, but Apple never saw the market and continues now to offer only an antiquated Cinema Display – that never was great – and the newish LED Cinema Display for the glossy-loving home-user accustomed to LCD TVs.

Image Credit: Courtesy of NEC Display Solutions

Therefore on most serious workstations you will find either a [NEC] or [EIZO] display. It’s hard to choose between both brands. Both are outstanding in display performance, but i decided to go with a NEC as they are not so premium-priced and their displays are available with a SpectraView II Kit [not in all regions], which is the way to go with NEC.

[The SpectraView II Kit] consists of the SpectraView II software and a custom-calibrated NEC/[X-Rite] iOne Display 2 colorimeter. The benefits are clear. NEC handpicks the colorimeter and calibrates it to its Spectra View displays. The Spectra View II software can then analyze the measurements and send them to the monitor.

And that’s the difference between a professional editing screen and other branded wide-gamut screens. The screen has an internal look-up table [LUT] and the measurements are made in the hardware and not in the graphic card of the workstation. Just look at the depth of the screen and you will understand that there is more under the hood than in the average display. To be able to rotate your display 180 degrees for portrait work is a really nice thing to have.

Colors are outrageously vivid and cover a very wide gamut, otherwise impossible to achieve. Your images will come alive and especially the orange, red and purple gamuts will impress you. Important, if you are working in a wide-gamut working-space as ProFoto RGB or preparing files for fine art prints. No more guesswork is needed.