I’ve wondered about getting a new monitor for some time mainly for more space. I don’t find HD format monitor ideal for photo work and stuck with the older sizes while I could. I took the plunge and bought this 40" 4k iiyama. I don’t see myself photo editing images at 4k but the extra space will be useful. PDF pages will be a better fit too. 40" because I didn’t want to go too far away from 100 dpi. My dell was 104 and this one is 111. Oddly the scaling on linux and kde is better - 10-August-2017 fits perfectly. Text looks sharper too. No idea why.
The monitor uses an MVA panel. To be honest viewing angles look as good as IPS or at least not far off it. As always it was supplied way to bright and when viewed from the side images reddened. So I’ve calibrated it. There is no signs of that now. These are the results.
As you can see it more than covers sRGB and the other results are pretty good. The worst errors are grey scale. I couldn’t set precisely to 6500K thanks to the makers deciding to allow adjustments between 0 and 100 on the colour channels. That’s the norm now. The actual hardware probably still works from 0-255 which would allow finer adjustment, It would set to 6600K with a de of 0.1 which is more than good enough really,
Only thing I am not sure about is the reflectivity of the panel. It’s the first one I have had that has a noticeable one. It’s not as bad as some TV’s but not up to Dell’s ultrasharp range and most others I have used. I’d describe them as more than ghostly but still pretty dim.
Price - cheaper than my 27" dell which I bought some years ago.
Only thing is - I don’t know how many lcd type monitors I have had usually well past their sell by date and the single iiyama one was the only one to fail to come on one day. They did have a good name on CRT displays. None of those that I owned failed and I switched to lcd types pretty early on. Belinea did some reasonably priced ones.
This post may bore you but if people want to know what a monitor can do there is no substitute for a real example. They are often hard to find. I maybe able to get a better result by setting black point compensation. A run takes 1/2hr+ and I may try several over the next week.
I’ve seen some posts about 4k monitors that I feel misunderstand the resolution aspects. It’s probably best to start with quality printing in magazines etc. It will often be 300dpi. This is down to the human eye and is reckoned by opticians to give very decent images for people with good vision when viewed from 10" or sometimes stated as 250mm as there isn’t much difference.
Monitors traditionally have been about 100dpi for some time. All that means is that for the same view quality they need to be viewed from 30" instead of 10. A 4k hd format monitor needs a diagonal of 43" to get to the same dpi as most Dell monitors use, about 104dpi. On the face of it there isn’t any point in having higher dpi unless the viewing distance is reduced from 30". I’m sitting here viewing from around 27" and can’t see any pixels at 111dpi. The size of the text etc is the same size as it was with my previous 27" 104dpi monitor. In fact it’s a bit clearer probably because for some reason X has made a better job of the scaling. i can see it has when I look at the date format on the taskbar. The tails on y and g are not slightly chopped off
The next problem is viewing angle. The 300dpi printing sometimes mentioned 10x8" prints as at 10" that is as much the eye can see clearly. Personally I think that is too big really and at that size and distance peripheral vision has dropped off noticeably. Our vision drops off suddenly as the viewing angle gets wider so if we need to see detail in that area we have to look at it. On that basis I’d guess that a 20" monitor viewed from 30" is as much as we can really take in sensibly. Probably a lot less.
You might say I am mad buying a 40" monitor because of all of these factors. I see it as being used with windows of more or less the same size as they were on my 27" apart from making some use of the increased vertical pixel count for photo work. The extra space will also help with dockable windows. More things can remain up on the display too without having to move them around etc. That will be useful.
I’ve more or less got used to the screen reflection now. Best way to describe them is that if I view myself from a few feet in them i can make out that I have eye sockets - no detail. My watch is clearer but not distinct. Need to find a very dark photo to work on and see what happens.
I’ve noticed some light fall off on the right hand edge. If I position myself more central to the monitor it lessen. If I move my head back it lessens. It’s only over an inch or so and noticeable on a kde folder view - grey white mix. So looks to be a viewing angle thing. I had wondered why there was curved screen monitors about. This might be the reason and it’s even been done on IPS panels. It’s a lot less noticeable on the left hand edge. I’ve seen mention of over tightened screw so might try loosening them a touch but for folder views, console, email etc it doesn’t really matter.
I’ve mounted the monitor on a tv desktop stand. The ones that cover 37-55" monitors/tv’s. It puts it at the right height for me. Under £15 from ebay. The same thing is available at all sorts of prices so bought cheapest. The screws that go into the back of the monitor with it are too long though. Iiyama spec 10mm long but 12mm is ok. ;-( Had to buy a pack of 50 from Toolstation to obtain 4.
It’s a hard decision 'cause I could send it back. Now I have done some photo work on it I’d say that the viewing angle is worse than IPS particularly vertically. This I think is about the max size that could be worked on very probably even if the image was square. Visually this one is 14" tall. It’s fine if looked at pretty square on.
I have got a better calibration out of it now. Well within all of the recognised best limits. I activated black compensation in DisplayCal. That reduces the dynamic range but the grey scales is not far off perfect now. The dynamic range is still over 3,000 : 1. That’s the advantage of this style of panel. It’s way more than my dell IPS and that needed the black compensation as well. 6,700K though so more runs to do - ideally.
I managed to get a verification report of how it arrived in it’s colour normal mode. It’s on filebin so will disappear in a month or so. The colour patches show any colour errors. Colour wise it’s better than some dell’s. Grey scale isn’t so good as can be seen. Too far out for photo work really so it needs calibration. That’s then pretty good but the grey scale does have minor errors. I’ve had dells that are pretty clean in that area - more than they need be after calibration.
Last thing to check related to the fact that the monitor can cover a lot of colours that are out of the sRGB gamut. The monitor profiling is done in the software on the pc and in the graphics card. The pc should have sufficient resolution to prevent odd out of gamut colours popping up. I wasn’t sure about the graphics card. That may have been using 8bit sums. Turns out it’s using a 10bit LUT so less chance of rounding errors.
From what I can find out it seems nvidia are a bit hit and miss in this area and this aspect will have an effect on the calibrated profiles I have posted. AMD it seems are better in this respect. That may be historic info though.
The other aspect is that I use DisplayCal to calibrate the monitor. Some windows and mac users probably stick with the software that came with the colorimeter. I have no idea what those would achieve. The ones I have seen run a lot quicker and involve less user adjustments. With DisplayCal it’s very important to get the first stage as accurate as possible. The colour channel and brightness controls inter react so I don’t find it unusual to spend the best part of 15mins setting that part up and even calibrating several times.
I may have mentioned using a black point adjustment to clean the grey scale up. If so the name I should have used is “black point correction”. I just use the auto setting.
I used an xrite colourmonkey display These are identical to the iDisplayPro really and just a bit slower to use but are a touch cheaper. The author of diplaycal pulled a bit of a face in respect to using these for a 10bit LUT but without spending a lot more money there is no where to go and there might still be no accuracy improvement. Also the iDisplay Pro is what Dell supply for their hardware calibrated monitors which suggests they are pretty good.
Oh and DisplayCal has added yet another feature so I will probably be doing yet another run later.
Only thing is - I don’t know how many lcd type monitors I have had usually well past their sell by date and the single iiyama one was the only one to fail to come on one day. They did have a good name on CRT displays. None of those that I owned failed and I switched to lcd types pretty early on. Belinea did some reasonably priced ones.
but if people want to know what a monitor can do there is no substitute for a real example. They are often hard to find. I maybe able to get a better result by setting black point compensation. A run takes 1/2hr+ and I may try several over the next week.