Monday night, my computer monitor expired. No great surprise there -- I'd had it for many years, and was surprised it had lasted so long. Anyway, those cool new widescreen flat-panel monitors were available everywhere, for a much-lower price than I had paid for my monitor the last time around. Piece of cake, right?
Well, not exactly.
After a bit of research, I discovered that there are several different types of panels used on current flat-screen monitors. The most popular, and the one used on almost all lower-cost monitors, is a type called Twisted Nematic (TN). TN panels have the advantage of having very fast refresh times, so action (DVDs, video games) appears to be running at a high frame rate. The (big!)
disadvantage of TN panels is that they only do 18-bit color (6 bits per channel), and therefore don't even display the full color gamut of sRGB (the smallest of normal gamuts used in digital photography). In other words, for "digital darkroom" work, not very accurate in giving you an idea how your pictures
really look.
There are other types of flat-panel displays. Two that work much better than TN for photography uses are In-Plane Switching (IPS) and Patterned Vertical Alignment (PVA -- better versions are identified as S-PVA or cPVA). Both of these will reproduce true 24-bit color. Unfortunately, they're both considerably more expensive. While TN models are easily found in the $110-$140 price range, in my research, I only found one acceptable non-TN monitor (Samsung's PVA-based F2080, which Fry's listed as in the process of being "closed-out") for under $250. And the sky's the limit when it comes to IPS displays -- I've heard of some "professional photographer" models that sell for over $5,000!
How to make sure the model you choose is right for photographic purposes? Obviously, the first step is to stay
far away from TN panels. One quick test is to look at a monitor from either above or below. If the images inverts (looks a bit like a color negative), you're looking at a TN panel. To find an appropriate IPS or PVA panel, you might want to check
here or
here, although neither of these covers all models currently available. I understand the Dell UltraSharp monitors, from around $300-$500, have a good reputation, although I seem to recall some people having qualms about Dell's political affiliations, which I don't know anything about myself.
By the way, one other thing to be prepared for, if you're moving from a 4 : 3 display to a new widescreen one, is odd behavior from your video card upon making the switch. When I did so, I found my ATI card would not allow me to set the display to the F2080's native resolution of 1600x900 (the closest it would give me was 1440x900, giving everything the "funhouse mirror" stretch effect familiar from people playing 4 : 3 television programming on new 16 : 9 sets). I finally did get it to give me 1600x900, but only by uninstalling everything related to the card (drivers, Catalyst, etc.) and going straight back to 640x480 VGA, then re-installing the video-card software from scratch, starting with the several-years-old version that came with the card, then upgrading to more recent downloadable versions of the support software. (And then, of course, I had to re-calibrate the monitor with my Spyder2express as soon as it got dark enough to do so.) Everything's working now, but, between the failure of the original monitor, shopping for the new one, then going through the installation craziness and final calibration...let's just say there go a couple of days of my life I'm never going to get back...