I need your advice. I am looking for a monitor for professional photography.
Requirement:
The price should be around 1000 - 1200 Euro.
It should work as well as possible with Linux (calibration, use of profiles etc.) I am currently using Kubuntu 18.04 Linux.
Should not be less than 27" in size.
Everything else overpowers me right now. In the internet there are so many discussions about the values to be considered and countless recommendations that I get headaches and cannot make a decision.
I know that there is already a Tread here, but it was more about taking one from the preselected models and the last contribution was 2017.
I would be very grateful if you could give me some tips from your experience and knowledge!
I saw SW271 often recommended, so i bought it, it’s native 10bit, 99% adobe rgb, srgb and adobe rgb simulation. The monitor hardware calibration sw (palette master) is windows only, but i already have partition for that.
awesome. now if we only had software support for 10-bit rendering. i’m running x in 30bit/pixel mode (well 32, it also has two bit alpha) and i have interesting effects. for one, this is gimp:
(see the icons? this is what libre office looks like all over the place, too)
also i need to reboot my computer every time the monitor goes to sleep because it will not recover from that. such minor issues aside… gradients do look much smoother in 10 bits, even though my monitor is only an 8-bit + 2-bit-magic device.
sigh
I’d get a smaller Eizo. I have here a BenQ SW240. I had to get a replacement for the first one because it whined. This one is very slightly greenish in the bottom left corner and slightly reddish in the right edge. I mean you don’t see it on normal photos only on uniform test images. Meanwhile I got used to it. Otherwise, it has 125% AdobeRGB. Calibration software only works in Windows and is buggy. It can do 10bit but my graphics don’t support it.
Or what about a Nec?
Edit: you can get used to AdobeRGB. I have the BenQ since almost a year now. When I go back to an sRGB screen I think it looks grey. I used to edit photos in sRGB but now I don’t like it.
yeah, smooth gradients would be awesome, i tested 10bit for short time but there were similar issues i gone back to 8-bit for now and as you mentioned software doesn’t support it
From my own research you have only 2 options: Nec or Eizo.
Both have calibration software running natively in Linux. They have proven stability and reliability. For Nec you need to have a license for SpectraView and for Eizo you need to ask your local supplier for the ColorNavigator (isn’t publicly available).
Nec has surprisingly good and cheap models Multisync EA245WMi and EA275WMi. In Poland you can buy CT (or just Color) version which are just checked and precalibrated for sRGB.
The BenQ is quite fresh and from what I read there is a big unknown how it will keep it’s parameters during it’s usage (I didn’t need to recalibrate my Eizo CS2420 even after a year!).
I have decided for Eizo CS2420 (+x-rite i1display pro) and I know that this display will outlive a few of my computers and cameras
JFYI: until a few weeks ago both AMD and Nvidia blocked 10bit output on their non workstation cards in the drivers. both announced they want to allow 10bit output now also on consumer cards. you want to keep that in mind with your testing.
About the stability of BenQ panels. I am not sure whether it’s an issue with the panel itself or the Spyder5 I am using, or in fact the calibration software.
When I bought my screen and calibrated it for the first time, I could not calibrate it properly to 6500K, meaning some shades of middle grey had a color cast. However I could fix this with calibrating to 6000K. But apparently this has changed since then. Now some greys have a color cast when I calibrate it to 6000K (or lower) and 6500 looks perfect. Looks like the panel is somehow changing, or the calibration software is c***. The Spyder works well with Displaycal. During the first months, I had to recalibrate once a month. I actually saw the change in the very bright and very dark tones, they were also clearly visible in test images (but I have very sharp eyes, so probably most normal people would not see the difference). Anyway the change was measurable and for me visible. But since a few months, the calibration does not appear to change any more. I check it once a month, Palette Master Elements can also measure that delta thing, you know. Nevertheless I try to calibrate it once a month.
a few weeks or a few months/years? fwiw it works just fine with a stock gaming driver 440.x and a 2080Ti. also delivering 10bits on screen with std x11 + opengl/vulkan is not an issue.
So I have a Geforce MX 250 and a BenQ SW240. Do they support 10bit now (the screen definitely does according to the specs)? I have an HDMI port - do I need a special cable?
if you want to find out, you can create your own /etc/X11/xorg.conf (maybe via nvidia-xconfig). then edit Depth 24 → Depth 30 in the screen section. if your X still comes up after a reboot, you’re good
if you run nvidia-settings, in the X Screen 0 section, there should be a line ‘Depth: 30’ somewhere if everything went well.
