Today I got my hands on a Philips 240v5 24" 1080p monitor and after fiddling with the setting I’ve got the white and black levels where I want them, but noticed that there are some differences in colors, especially red (which is much more vivid and slightly pinkish) and green (more intense green), compared to my laptop.
While it’s not a huge difference, I’d like to get as close as possible to the correct colors (or at least relative to my laptop, which seems to have the best colors of the devices I had, at least by comparison using the color wheel). I looked at display calibrators, but the cheapest are around 140€… which is a lot. I don’t know if the price tag justifies the accuracy increase (possibly one time use) and if it is going to work at all, like if it is only for supported monitors or something (after looking up info I still don’t fully understand) - I’m not planning to print, just to share pictures online occasionally. What do you think?
If you want to edit on both systems and not worry about things looking the same, then its worth it. Of you can already see a difference, then I’d say say worth it.
BTW, it’s not a one time use, its a once a quarter usage.
A colorimeter is a very good investment. It’s very hard to estimate the right display brightness and color temperature/white point by eyesight, human perception is very subjective.
Trust me, trying to calibrate without a device is just masochism. 140€ is not that expensive.
Also make sure you use consistent lighting in your editing room. Your eyes naturally adjust to the ambient light, and this influences your edits, too. Any dynamic screen brightness should be disabled for editing as well.
And, of course, make sure any “night shift” warmer-in-the-evening feature of your computers is switched off.
Screen brightness is interesting. If your screen has good blacks, then any screen brightness will do, theoretically. At least when your target medium is other screens, which tend to be at full brightness, too. (Just make sure to actually use both black and white, otherwise a high-brightness screen will bias you towards lower-than-intended contrast.) If your screen does not have good blacks, you’ll tend to crush your shadows to accommodate.
It’s a difficult balance. Darktable’s color assessment mode is helpful here, as it puts both pure white and pure black right around your image, so as to calibrate your vision to the capabilities of your display. But despite that, and despite good and consistent lighting in my office, I tend to edit brighter during daytime than at night .
But if you’re targeting prints, it’s a different matter entirely. Now you’re dependent on the black and white levels of your printer-paper-lighting combination. In theory, this, too, can be calibrated. But in my experience, the only real solution is proof prints. At any rate, prints have far less dynamic range than any screen, on the order of 5 stops instead of 8-10 stops. But your vision will partly correct for the difference between reflective light and emissive light. In addition, your lighting will further interact with your inks, so you need good-CRI lighting as well… It’s a whole quagmire of detail and decisions. As I said, your best bet is to make test prints and look at them at the intended location with the destination lights.
I forgot to add, some monitors go weird at 100%, so stepping it down a little is generally a good idea. And sRGB does define a target brightness and standardized viewing illumination. But whether that’s useful for non-colorists is debatable (it’s important if you need to color-match a brand’s trademarked color scheme).
I noticed that there is a slightly darker area covering lower center part of the screen (icons in the taskbar are noticeably darker, it fades towards center). I suppose that’s a significant problem, right? The screen has been originally discarded so this might have been the reason.
That’s probably at the lower end of what you should pay for a new device. You do get what you pay for, to some extent. Avoid any of the Spyders - they are universally bad (for various reasons, depending on the generation). A solid budget choice is the CaliBrite Display SL, which is a rebranded CaliBrite ColorChecker Display Pro, which again was a rebranded i1Display Pro.
That depends on the device and the kind of backlight used in the monitor. The Display SL should work with any monitor that isn’t super-bright HDR (don’t remember how many nits it can handle).
Yes, that’s a problem. Brightness should be uniform.
While pro-grade monitors can be very expensive, you can get a pretty good 1080p IPS monitor with 100% sRGB coverage for a few hundred euros.
CaliBrite Display SL
I could get that for about 160€, which is an insignificant increase in price. Non-fading filters seem to be one of the most important features it seems.
Reviews seem to be good. One guy addresses that backlight evenness is good for its price (190€), although it could be slightly better. I think it’s going to be far better compared to what this monitor suffers though.
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