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May not be a "requirement" but you can't find anything non-"smart" to purchase new.

Yes you can, they are called names like "display panel" instead of "TV". Here you go, notice that many of those have integrated TV tuners. That's essentially a monitor with a TV tuner, which sounds exactly like what people in this thread are saying they use their TV for.

You see, LCDs are fixed-colors with narrow bandwidth. You often have a 630nm red, 550nm green, and 450nm blue crystal pixel filter. Because of that, you are NOT reproducing deeper reds or blues.

The NEC PA241W does. It's a wide gamut IPS LCD screen with no LEDs except the power light.

LED-based screens can overcome this.

By "LED-based," do you mean LED backlighting, or OLED?

When you calibrate an LCD, you shift a digital value to one that already existed, and lose a boatload of the digital color nuances between the color points, making many of them the same color. ANY calibration of an LCD means decreasing the number of colors. The "xxx% NTSC/AdobeRGB" gamut value becomes false the moment you adjust it, dropping through the floor.

That is only true if you are attempting to calibrate a panel using software that adjusts the output of the graphics card. LCD monitors that are designed to be color accurate can be calibrated by modifying the color LUT inside the monitor. Look at NEC's SpectraView line for an example.

In NEC's case most of their monitors have a 14-bit LUT built-in and receive a 10-bit signal so there is a lot of room for adjustment while still ensuring that no colors are lost. Once calibrated the monitor remains accurate even if connected to a different input source because the calibration is done in the panel itself and not the source.

Wrong product for your solution.
Firstly with tiles you'll be unlikely to drive all the displays at this native resolution, and if you can what content will you have for it?
Secondly if you want to tile a large area the better solution would be panels made for that purpose which have thin bezels. Companies make products specifically for tiled displays.
 

I have this monitor http://www.necdisplay.com/p/desktop-monitors/e222w-bk , which is 16:10, and pivoted it's not a good experience for me. I commented elsewhere, so not to repeat myself let's just say a 4:3 pivot would be superior for me.

you can try 2880 x 900 via http://www.necdisplay.com/newtechnologies/curveddisplay/

first, 'upgrade' was referring to using drivers that reenable the disabled features of the pro card's drivers.

If a pro card is installed but features are disabled that's stupid, and I don't want to be a customer of said business. All this does is increase the cost.

secondly, unless your photography somehow involves high end opengl 3d acceleration needs, then i think you have been misled about what the 'pro' card gives you

Fact is is that while online graphics may not need much it's totally different for print. High res and deep colour depths are important for some things. If you're getting married and higher a photographer you want your photos to be as good as they can be. The same if you're an ad or commercial photographer or a fine art photographer. Pro photographers can go through tyme, hassle, and money to make sure what they see on their monitor matches what they print. An Eizo monitor, even a 24" can cost thousands of dollars. NEC and LaCie are just as expensive. Monitors with an S-IPS/H-IPS type panel can be quite expensive, but of you make your living in photography or other graphics arts you need such a monitor. Once you have a good monitor you then have to use a colorimeter like an Eye-one or Huey to calibrate the monitor. If you're also doing the printing yourself and not having a pro lab do it you also have to calibrate the printer. Going through all this you don't want a cheap graphics card driving your monitor.

Falcon

I know it's a significant difference, which is why I listed the components individually. Obviously a lot of money could be saved by just buying a cheaper graphics card. If I bought an equivalent video card to the Mini (say a Radeon 7000 at $26) I would save $264, bringing the total to $998. I could buy only one hard drive, saving another $80, and still have twice the storage of the largest drive for a Mini. Now we are looking at only an extra $120 (at most, the online Mac store is down right now so I can't compare exact prices). For that extra money you get a computer with a processor that is 3-4 times faster, four times as much RAM as the standard Mini, a faster and larger hard drive, and a much better motherboard (twice as many USB ports, Firewire ports, two gigabit ethernet ports, built-in wireless with external antenna, faster front-side bus, etc.).

I understand that there's a market for the Mini, especially for the space savings. But the main thing that irks me isn't the price. It's the fact that I can't upgrade it without paying Apple to do it for me (unless I want to go ahead and rip the case off, voiding the warranty). We have a Mini at my office and it is dog slow, even for only browsing the web using Firefox (it's a model that was sold when they first came out to be fair). And if you have to do any development on it using Eclipse you are in for a world of hurt. The built-in visual editor tends to crash the program (happens on other Macs I've noticed, not sure if it is Eclipse's fault or the Mac implementation of the JRE) and causes the program to run even more slowly. We would have upgraded the RAM on it by now if it wasn't such a PITA. Instead, we replaced it with a new iMac with a 24" screen for about $2500. The new system runs well but would still get trounced by almost any benchmark vs. the system I built. With a new 24" LCD monitor costing about $530 my system would cost $1792, over $600 cheaper! Even if I bought one of the most expensive 24" LCD monitors at newegg ($810) my system would still be $400 cheaper at $2072. I selected this monitor because it has an equivalent or superior rating for each spec vs. the 24" display of the iMac (1000:1 contrast vs. 700:1, 500 cd/m vs. 400 cd/m brightness, same resolution, same viewing angle, 6ms response time vs. 14ms, better warranty--3yr free vs. 90-day or 3yr for extra money). And just so you know these numbers aren't coming out of my ass, here are my references.

Granted, I did have to use a weekend to setup my system (and I have experience building my own systems, which helps), but it is much more future-proof than a Mini or iMac since it is so much more upgradeable. While the build time should be a factor to be considered, so should the ability to individually replace components over time.

Quantization issues are well understood, it doesn't take a color guru to understand that. However, name-dropping digitaldog as you leap to conclusions about the new display is total bullshit. Claiming that the new displays have improved gamut is pure, baseless speculation at this point. Furthermore, I've read reliable explanations for why notebook LED displays can't be wider gamut.

Wow, you really do know how to turn on the charm, don't you?

I do have to say yes, you're right that I've speculated about wider gamut on the new MBP LED displays, as have a lot of other sources, from folks posting in messageboards to MacInTouch to MacWorld. Much of this speculation concerns comparisons to NEC's nice LED-backlit display that claims to recreate "107% of the AdobeRGB colorspace". (Yes I realize, the backlighting on the NEC display is almost certainly quite different from that of the new MacBook Pro).

I've looked for a bit and don't find Apple making any claims at all about wider gamut for the new MBP LED displays. So yep, all speculation at this point. I deserve a spanking for thinking I'd seen Apple claiming wider gamut when that impression was mainly created by my conflation of "news" coverage and people raving in blogs and fora with what Apple had actually announced. It'd be nice to see Apple make some claims about what the display will do, but they're probably smarting about such things this week.

I wasn't "name-dropping" Andrew Rodney to try and grab some cred, buddy. Frankly, my own favorite color management guru passed away recently. I just figured that if I was going to mention Rodney's name, I should point to his site.

Andrew Rodney weighs in on LED- vs. CCF-illuminated displays in this forum post discussing the new MacBook Pro machines - though he doesn't specifically address the MBP display, which one might or might not assume he's seen.

And BTW, Rodney links to his own site in his .sig, so you'd sure better go bitch at him about it too. Looks like you've got the time on your hands.

Ok.. on top of this article there's this NEC ad about display solutions, that leads to this page

It says "What could you dream with NEC" and on the other side there's an image with naked children. What are you trying to do with us NEC!? Aaaahh! /me runs away

The backlighting in most LCD monitors is a mercury tube, though. :)

(LED backlighting is in the works, but such monitors currently cost several thousand dollars.)

For an even better (in my opinion) CRT try the Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2070SB. This is the monitor of choice around here (and what I use.)

I have never seen a monitor with a better picture, they exist (especially for satallite imaging) and are probably pretty impressive, but outside the price range of mere mortals.

No LCD comes close to the picture quality of a good CRT, the size and price were not really a concern, as if you are going to spend most of your day in front of a monitor, it is nice to have a good one.

The cheaper LCDs are much better than the cheap CRTs though, getting a headache from staring at a cheap CRT for hours sucks.

I don't understand this article. Is it hard to buy a high-quality CRT these days? No. Just surf over to Viewsonic or NEC. Seems like many companies are still manufacturing CRTs right now, which means they will be available from the manufacturer for at least 4 years, and could still be purchased second-hand for (I'm guessing) another 15 years. If in 15 years LCDs still don't meet your needs, I imagine it won't matter, since your particular application will have long since been replaced with something different.

Sorry, but this seems like a non-issue to me.

You are partly correct but this is wrong:

" The 60Hz refresh rate only corresponds to how often the pixel "might" get told to change, there is no pulsing."

See:

"Since LCD monitors do not employ phosphors, refresh rate is not a concern. Basically, the transistors in the LCD remain open or closed as needed until the image changes. This can be a point of confusion for some consumers, however, since most graphics cards still "ask for" a refresh rate setting. This is due to the analog nature of existing graphic cards (see "Inputs" section) and their support for CRT displays. While refresh rates do not apply to LCD monitors, most LCDs are set up to accept any settings from 60Hz and above."

Source: http://www.necdisplay.com/support/css/monitortechg uide/index04.htm