LCDs - brightness, contrast, remote proofing-part1
LCDs - brightness, contrast, remote proofing-part1
- Subject: LCDs - brightness, contrast, remote proofing-part1
- From: "Chris McFarling" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 17:55:41 -0500
I've spent a considerable amount of time lately researching the pros and
cons of the current crop of LCD displays on the market. It's obvious that
the CRT market, for color critical work at least, is dying if not dead. I
think we may have gotten the last 2 NEC CRTs that CDW had about 6 months
ago. Before I had a chance to do some really in depth research, we needed to
get a couple new monitors. Based on info from this list and other resources,
I opted for two different monitors, an Apple Cinema Display 20" and a Dell
2005FPW. Being that both utilize the same LCD matrix I was interested to see
what the differences would be, considering the Dell is about $350 cheaper.
Also, the setting that the ACD would be used in would benefit from the wow
factor that the ACD exudes while the Dell would be tucked away in a
producton environment.
My initial experience with both of these displays has sparked several
questions and some confusion. For several years, we've been using
NEC-Mitsubishi 2070SB CRT monitors. As a prepress shop, we need to match
printed material (or more precisely, digital and analog proofs). Our CRTs
have been calibrated with a luminance of around 85-90 cd/m2, which gives a
close match to our hard copy proofs based on our lightning conditions.
After calibrating/profiling both LCD monitors (using Monaco OptixXR Pro),
the luminance was way too high. The lowest I could get it down to was around
150 for the ACD, higher for the 2005FPW. Looking at the calibrated ACD,
2005FPW, and 2070SB all side-by-side, the LCDs were simply too bright and
were not representative of our hard copy proofs.
So one question has to do with the ACD. Since it has just a backlight
brightness control and no other controls, how are other users handling
situations were the lowest brightness setting is not low enough? One big
marketing point for LCDs seems to be how bright they are compared to CRTs.
I'm wondering how important that is in regards to a prepress environment. It
seems that the brightness of LCDs is partially driven by the home
entertainment market where brightness is king. In an effort to serve the
widest range of consumers, I think manufacturers therefore tend to make
brightness a high priority intrinsic to the manufacturing process, even
though their products are sometimes destined to environments where that is
not as much of an issue. Am I wrong on that? It just seems that for the
longest time prepress/print professionals have gotten along just fine with
the lower luminance CRTs are capable of. Now were being told that brighter
is better. Is it really better or are we just being told that because that's
what they're selling us? Back to the ACD...it would seem to me that the
too-bright problem could be reduced by adding a contrast control. The
contrast would be able to reduce the brightness of white to an acceptable
level. I thought that the lack of a contrast control was a shortcoming of
the ACDs, however, I read a post on here in which Karl Lang (as much of an
expert as anyone could be) said that he thought the lack of any controls
other that brightness on the ACD was good thing. That confuses me. Can
anyone shed some light on why that would be?
Speaking of contrast, the 2005FPW does have a contrast control, however it
is disabled when the display is connected via DVI. When connected via analog
it is available. Does anyone know why they would do that? Dell has a tech
note that states the following:
"When a Digital Flat Panel monitor is connected via the Digital Video
Interface (DVI) connector, the contrast will be grayed out (unavailable).
This is normal, and the flat panel is functioning as designed. While
connected via the DVI, the contrast for the flat panel is controlled by the
video card."
I fond that odd, but ok. So, does that mean that the video card used DDC to
simply communicate with the display and tell it what to set its contrast to?
Or does that mean that the video card must alter the signal being sent to
the display? I posed that question to Dell support and of course they were
clueless. If anyone knows the answer please let me know. The only way to get
the 2005FPW down to an acceptable brightness was to connect it via analog
and reduce the contrast. Using analog over DVI goes against pretty much any
recomendations I've seen (and for good reason) but that seems to be the only
way to make it usable.
<<continued in part 2>>
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