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LCD Screen for Image Editing
An anonymous reader writes "Most image editors will tell you that the colour accuracy on an LCD monitor is still nowhere near as good as a high quality CRT. Although this is generally true, this new screen from NEC is definitely a big step forward for the LCD cause."
In 2005 we are expected to have flat (just a little thicker than LCDs) CRT monitors. Since the makers are promising that these monitors will be cheaper than their LCD counterparts, wouldn't saavy buyers just wait until then and get a higher (or equal) quality monitor at the same price?
I will argue a point without seeing the article, since it is dead. This screen is still likely much more expensive than a CRT, so unless the desk space you save with the LCD is worth a couple hundred dollars, I am guessing this is not going to appeal to most people.
The people who buy LCD's now do it because they are small, sexy, and save on desk space. The very SMALL minority will be buying an LCD just because it has good colors and refresh rates. Those people do exist (ie gamers and graphic designers and such) but most people are just looking for the slim, sexy design of the LCD, myself included. Code looks just fine on an LCD, I use one at work 9 hours a day, with no trouble at all.
I think there is a much bigger problem with LCD than color accuracy - defective subpixels. In a recent month I had to return three over $1K LCDs (for those who are interetsted: two LaCie Phonot20Vision II and one NEC/Mitsubishi LCD2080UX+). And it doesn't seem even a single manufacturer (not even Apple) is trying to change this; all of them agreed (they even cooked up an ISO standard for this) that some small number of defects is acceptable. Until this nonsense stops LCD will be staying where they are now - consumer electronics.
LCDs are ok, but pretty much useless for graphics apps due to low contrast and washed out color
Yeah and CRTs tend to have over-saturated color that drifts over time. I'm a prepress tech, and I have to do a lot of color correcting for my job and the general rule is that the screen is wrong. period.
A CRT or LCD will never be able to represent colors in RGB that exists in CMYK, or even some of the wildly bright color in the Pantone system. How can a monitor reproduce fluorescent orange or silver metallic ink? It can't. Once your good, you can mentally map what a color should look like compared to what it looks like on screen. Most of the people in my field who complain about how LCD aren't color accurate are just looking for an excuse when they can't remap their own color perception lookup table in their head.
And, if you complain about how a LCD has crappy contrast or under-saturated colors and a poor refresh rate, maybe you should buy a nice LCD instead of a cheap piece of crap from Walmart.
-tschak
One problem with all the 1280x1024 LCD monitors are that they don't have square pixels. The display itself is 4:3, but the pixels are squat, unlike 1600x1200, 1280x960, 1024x768, 800x600 et cetera.
This is completely, 100% false.
1280x1024 LCD screens have a 5:4 aspect ratio. This is why the resolution can be 1280x1024, and the pixels remain square. 1280x1024 screens are the only screens with a 5:4 ratio. Don't ask me why this is, but it is. You can easily verify this by looking at the specs on any LCD with this native resolution.
I would guess you're confusing what happens when you use 1280x1024 as a resolution on CRT's. This will give you non-square pixels, and you should not use 1280x1024 on a CRT for this reason (unless you have a 5:4 CRT, and I'd guess there are at least a few of them out there). You should use 1280x960 instead. But this does not apply to LCD's, all of which have one native resolution, and they're built specifically to support that native resolution.
Now, as to this assertion in the original article post that "most image editors" think LCD's are "nowhere near as good" as CRT's... I think this is at the very least overly dramatic, if not outright false. First of all, what's an "image editor" to begin with? A retoucher? A photographer? A designer (and print or web)? All of the above?
Up until a few months ago I worked in the web design department for a large corporation, and like most companies we worked pretty closely with the print designers as well. 95% of my company used LCD's because they wanted to use LCD's. If any designer wanted a CRT they could simply request it - very few did (maybe two or three at the entire company). I personally had an LCD as a primary monitor and a CRT as secondary, because when working for the web it's important to see how things are going to look on different setups (especially when working with compressed images).
I'm also a photographer, and I don't have a CRT in my house. I have three LCD screens, and while not all of them are created equally (the oldest one does have a pretty narrow gamut), they're all at least adequate for photo processing, and my laptop screen is perfectly fine. I know plenty of other photographers who also do retouching on their laptops and don't feel they're missing anything.
LCD's are different, but even with a narrower gamut they do some things better than CRT's. No CRT can approach an LCD's pixel-perfect sharpness, for example - it's impossible to judge a photograph's true sharpness when viewing it on a CRT. So there are tradeoffs in both directions.
I think there's a difference between intellectually knowing that one thing may be technically better in certain areas than another thing, and actually using those things in real life. "Image editors" are people too, and they like the convenience and space savings of LCD screens as much as anybody else. And there are things that LCD's do better than CRT's, just as there are things CRT's do better than LCD's.