Again my curiosity got the upper hand. I had to try another LCD display to see how well it would work for color-managed photography editing. For a poor writer it was a big gamble at $1099, and I’m a lousy one at wagering. This time it was worth the price.
The specifications give just a few hints that the LaCie 324i will provide the performance a photographer needs in a computer display to do color and brightness match screen for printing. One is that it has a wide color range of 98% of Adobe RGB. Otherwise it is a 24 inch display with a 1920x1200 pixel resolution. The screen is P-IPS and has 10-bit gamma correction to reproduce smooth tones. It also has all the contemporary connection interfaces like DVI, HDMI and Display Port.
What I found that is not very evident, is that besides the usual manual adjustments of brightness and contrast, the LaCie 324i also has a backlight level control. This I found working with the set-up, adjustment, calibration and profiling to be a most valuable variable. Although I had to get to my ideal adjustment by trial and error. For some reason, although I have asked, there is not a scientifically based way to configure a displays adjustment in terms of brightness/contrast balance, although some display companies provide software that does it for you, if that is something you want to afford. They won’t help if you have a display that requires manual adjustment. I’ll let you guess what the reason is for being secretive and not offering any technical advise.
Anyway, after three tries I obtained a balance of brightness, contrast and backlight settings that resulted in a very good Delta-E feedback from ColorEyes Display Pro software using an X-Rite iOne Pro spectrophotometer to calibrate and profile the LaCie 324i. And I’ll keep my settings confidential too, as I have no basis other than my own experimenting that they would work as well if generally applied.
But the color is great and images are reproduced with good detail at all levels of brightness including highlights and shadows. Color saturation is high but not at all exaggerated almost perfectly matching the Adobe RGB gamut. So it is a pleasure to use and a refined tool to precisely adjust and edit photographic image files. I was also surprised that the 324i’s standard resolution in a 24 inch display reproduces detail sharply enough to make doing fine clean up and people retouching easy and almost a pleasure. Well for me it is a pleasure to make an images reproduce the subject to advantage, maybe even a little flattering.
The bottom line is that I am now confident I can put the LaCie 324i near the top of my list of recommended LCD displays for color-managed photography computing. It’s a bit expensive, but not at the top of the price list for pro-graphics LCD displays. You can get more details from the LaCie web site at:
Nice information. This post is really helpful for photographer. I like you post........
ReplyDelete