Digital Photographer magazine totally missing the point

[glitch]

So I was sat at the train station yesterday, getting increasingly bored while waiting for my train to arrive. So while I waited for my cup of coffee to be made, I popped into WH Smiths and had a flick through Digital Photographer.

What caught my eye was their large feature on two high-end LCD monitors; the LaCie 724 and the NEC Spectraview 2690. Or at least I think it was the 2690. It might have been a new release.

What they'd done is run through a whole gamut of in-depth tests, pitting these two heavyweights against each other. Everything had been covered and it was somewhat neck-and-neck until the final test; colour accuracy.

Surely colour accuracy and gamut coverage are the only reasons why you'd spent upwards of £1,000 on these monitors. Almost £2,000 in the case of the LaCie. So, naturally, they used the industry standard top-end calibration device to test both monitors - the LaCie Blue Eye Pro.

So who wants to tell me what they've done wrong?

Apologies for the crapness of the photo. I'd just heard my train being called and had to scamper off to the platform in great haste.

 

[Oakey22]

used a calibrator the same make as the monitor in question? thus making it biased towards the lacie?

 

[Marcel]

used sRGB

 

[Moos3h]

Using sRGB?

*EDIT: Damn you Marcel*

 

[glitch]

used a calibrator the same make as the monitor in question? thus making it biased towards the lacie?

Nope.

used sRGB

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

 

[Moos3h]

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

Mod h4x tbh.

 

[Roger Ramjet]

Could you elaborate please for those of us to whom this isn't obvious?

 

[AlfaFoxtrot]

sRGB is a reduced colour space mainly designed for the web. So if you wanted to test a monitor that can supposedly deliver a very wide range of colours you'd wanted to use RGB or a different colour space that would actually have that information in!

 

[glitch]

Could you elaborate please for those of us to whom this isn't obvious?

But of course.

Both of these stupendously expensive, professional-targeted monitors offer the capability of displaying colours over and above that of sRGB. In fact, the NEC is capable of displaying 95% of the AdobeRGB gamut and the LaCie 123%. Their accuracy, once calibrated, along with the gamut that each is capable of displaying is why you pay in excess of £1,000 for them.

The LaCie Blue Eye Pro calibrator is the industry standard hardware/software combination for calibrating your monitor. And it is fully capable of testing against both sRGB and AdobeRGB. In fact the screen you see at the end of the test usually displays three pieces of information in the form of the triangle; the sRGB gamut, the AdobeRGB gamut and the monitor's gamut, so you can compare the results accordingly.

So for some bizarre reason, Digital Photographer have chosen to omit the one piece of information that would actually be of any use to potential purchases of these monitors. Stupid doesn't even begin to cover it.

 

[DiddyDave]

sRGB is a reduced colour space mainly designed for the web.

And most Pro labs too - so if you're photographing for the telly (as I do) or for print from a normal Pro lab (as I do) then sRGB is what you use (as I do)

DD

 

[Roger Ramjet]

Okey doke, thanks for that.

 

[pxl8]

As I've pointed out in other threads, wide gamut is a mixed blessing if you are working to sRGB because it will introduce banding when editing - the monitor is capable of much greater saturation than sRGB so values RGB values above 220 are never used in colour managed apps. That means you're now trying to represent 16.7m colours out of a palette of 10.6m. £1000 for a monitor that can only display 10.6m colours, er no thanks.