I’m in the process of upgrading my PC and wondered if people had any advice about choosing between the thin Liquid Crystal Display monitors and conventional desktop (cathode ray tube) monitors?
Any advice on how they impact on colours displayed and printing would be appreciated!
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Check this recent thread: "Photoshop and HP 1210 Printer." LCDs at this point in time are much harder to calibrate. After following threads on this forum for a couple of years and working for a couple of hours yesterday to try and calibrate an LCD I got for Christmas, I would recommend a CRT. CRTs can be calibrated using software, but LCDs still require hardware in order to ensure calibration that’s more than just hit or miss (or luck!) Yes, it is possible to "fiddle" with them until they’re right, but that’s not my cup of tea. I’ll be sticking with a CRT for digital imaging for a while. Right now I still have to manually make the switch between the CRT and the LCD, which is awkward, but I’ve printed from both, and the CRT gives me prints that actually look the same on the paper as they do on the screen!
There are other reasons to choose an LCD over a CRT (some people’s eyes are very sensitive to the CRT for one thing), so I guess you need to make the final decision. But, if one of your primary uses will be digital imaging, be sure you do your own research before making a final decision. Is there a chance you could get a system that is capable of handling dual monitors? That’s what I’ll be doing, and I hope that won’t be too much farther in the future. It’s kind of the best of both worlds.
Hi Beth, Now that would be heavenly, to have a G5 with 2 monitors, one CRT and one LCD. Have the PSE tools on the LCD and the pictures we work on, on the CRT. Just talked with a person yesterday who has a G5 with 2 of the Apple 23 inchers on his desk at work. He invited me over to see their new set up, but I declined. Jane
You’re right, Jane, you don’t want to see it! 🙂 I was looking at the Apple Studio Displays a couple of days ago. Gorgeous, but I’d never be able to justify to myself – let alone my husband! – that kind of purchase!
I’m still working on this. I’ve done some reading on color management issues in Panther and am having second thoughts. How long to you suppose I can keep my 5 year old computer running?!
It depends on the way you use your computer Beth. If you don’t buy a lot of new softwares on a regular basis, you might be happy with what you have, and you will not notice visible slowdowns (newer softwares usually use more computer power). I don’t know about Apple’s way of doing things with their OS, but a five years old PC would not be able to run XP, not in a comfortable manner that is (lots of waiting time between various tasks). Memory would be a first thing to upgrade, then hard drive space would be severely limited because XP is very greedy on disk space.
My G4 is a bit over 4 years old, and very happy. My husband keeps asking me if I want an iMac, the new ones have the 17" screen for around $1800, but I keep procrastinating. But that new Apple store in our little town is only about 7 miles away, and they keep telling me to come in and play,,,,,,,,, Maybe I would do better to wait to next fall and go for the G5???? But for now, I am happy with my G4. Jane
Ray, I rebuilt much of my computer a little over a year ago, so it’ll run all the latest software and gear just fine, including Adobe CS. Given that it still has a few old pieces (like the mobo!), I was going to retire it gracefully. I do have another use for it, so getting a new G5 just sounded cool. And I still might, but not without more research. It’s seems Panther is the issue, not the G5 itself, and you can’t buy a G5 without Panther, so…
I actually got a photospectrometer when I first started printing this year because of caliabration problems. Do you think that using the photospectrometer would take away some of the concerns you have about LCDs?
Ian, Early last year, another Ian, Ian Lyons evaluated LCD displays ( he eventually bought an Apple Cinema 23" ) and decided that most of them under $1000 were not up to graphics imaging. He did like the Formac brand of displays ( about $900 , then ) . You are correct in your assumption that having calibration hardware is the way to go on the LCD units. I think the real graphics pro’s would say that even today , no LCD is the match of a good CRT monitor, but a number of LCD’s can be "acceptable" for graphics work .
I think it’s very much an individual decision on whether to pay more money for a good LCD display and get the "real estate" advantage, or stick with a better, but bulkier CRT .
🙂 You are soooo right, Nancy!! Lemme tell ya, sometimes being a "good consumer" can be the pits. I long for the days when I still made impulse purchases. I really don’t remember those being any worse than some of the planned purchases I’ve made in later years.
used an LCD for digital imaging and absolutly hated it. i now have a nice 23 inch samsung CRT hooked to my G4. the LCDs…….gave one to my daughter and wrapped the other up for my wife as a x-mas presant. between that and the hedge trimmers i got her x-mas quite eventful this year.
George, I’m going to try to beat Jodi to the punch on this one: just make sure your wife doesn’t decide to use those hedge trimmers for bobbiting… 🙂 Chuck
Louis, Talking about the photospectrometer from Post # 7. The profiling packages ( e.g. Monaco EZcolor, OptiCal, Gretag EyeOne ), have a hardware device which independent of the human eye, calibrates and profiles the display. For someone with my lousy color sense, it’s a necessity. My wife, who has some very serious talent with color, probably could do as well with Adobe Gamma. Regardless, LCD displays really need hardware profiling to be effectively profiled.
I bought Ezcolor 2.1 over a year ago and have the colorimeter bundled with the package. The more recent package includes an Optix sensor which works with both CRT’s and LCD’s, which my old one doesn’t .
I just had a great idea Brent! I’ll pack up all my gear next Summer and come back and visit you! You can get everything all tuned up for me, and then I’ll head home. How does that sound? 🙂
Electronics these days last much better than they used to but mechanical devices have a limited (and calculated) lifetime. I’d recommend that you invest in a new diskdrive for your mac and install it so you can have a backup of valuable data and programs which perhaps only run in OS 9.
Any new disk will be so much bigger too that you can partition the disk and simply copy your old disk to a new partition. Having done that you could junk the old disk, it’ll probably be making a whole lot more noise than the new one so you’ll probably soon get fed up with it whiring away.
Personally I reckon that disks can quit any time after three years so that’s my guidline for installing a new one.
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