WHAT’S UP? SOME NEW LCD DISPLAYS GOOD FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

For quite some time after the “prints too dark” problem erupted several years ago, there have been few LCD displays available ideally suited to doing digital photography computing. The first affordable break with this normality was the Dell Ultrasharp U2410 I reported on a few months ago.

Not long after I learned of a new 24 inch wide color range LaCie 324i, currently priced at $1099. So recently I got brave and ordered one for myself. Take a look at http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10524. I did a brief preview of this new LaCie , and am now working on a more detailed report for Shutterbug. 

Since then roaming the internet I have found that NEC has an even newer 24 inch Spectraview II 24 Inch LCD display replacing the recent NEC LCD2490W2-BK-SV model. This new NEC Spectraview model is PA241W-BK-SV with a list price of $1249. And it too has a wide color range reproducing 98.1% of Adobe RGB color. The detail information about this new display can be found at

http://www.necdisplay.com/p/desktop-monitors/pa241w-bk-sv

This time I was looking only for 24 inch LCD displays. The one 22 inch with standard 1680x1050 resolution I have reviewed I found does not compare with the 24’s 1920x1200 resolution in reproducing fine photographic detail, and there just isn’t that much higher cost in today’s new 24 inch displays. So lets take a look at the top company of the pro-graphics displays in Eizo Flexscan models. I worked with one 22 inch Flexscan for some time and the color was good, but it also has the 1920x1200 resolution of a 24 inch.

The newest Eizo Flexscan 24 inch is the SX2462W, also sporting 98% Adobe RGB color range. This new Eizo also provides what they call more effective software calibration. In addition Eizo has its own EasyPix version 2 software for their SX displays, and an Eizo EX1 Color Sensor is available with their software.

Of course you can go further with Eizo and consider what a few of my readers have purchased, an Eizo ColorEdge model, and there is much to choose from including 3 different 24 inch versions. The information on them is extensive on their web site at http://www.eizo.com/global/products/coloredge/index.html

Some of my readers have suggested they would like to actually see the displays I talk about. With Eizo for instance you can get a list of dealers on their web site. If you live in the northwest, one dealer, Chromix.com has a lot more than hardware to offer, it is also a reservoir of expert color management help if you go to their web site and click on ColorWiki you will find a library of expert knowledge on the subject. So they do more than sell the best in Eizo displays. But check the dealer list there may be a dealer not too far away.

If you would rather shop for the best price, one place you can check out is Amazon.com, they have listings for both NEC Spectraview II displays as well as Eizo Flexscan and ColorEdge models. More shopping choices are available on the Google Shopping site including listings of the LaCie 324i, as well as the NEC and Eizo models I have mentioned above. Digital photography editing and image adjustment is done entirely by your perception of the image on screen with your computer. So give your eyes a break and provide them with the best image quality you can.

YES, THE LACIE 324i IS AN LCD DISPLAY FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS

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:  

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10524 

A COMPUTER FOR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

First of all, what does a computer do? In our world today the word compute |kəmˈpyoōt| means to make a calculation, especially using a computer: modern circuitry can compute faster than any chess player. So is a photographic image made by a calculation of number values? Yes, to some extent with a digital camera. But graphics, an image on-screen was a side effect of computing, a part of the in and out communication with a computer. It was not what the computer did but how it communicated its answers after the question were typed into a computer with a keyboard. A monitor was just a convenient way to make a computer respond so its output could be read by human eyes.

In the 80’s when personal computers began to be common all they had was a keyboard and a monochrome display that reproduced text and numbers. During the same period Apple computers were used to begin the desktop publishing revolution, probably the first popular use of computers for graphic purposes. Today with computers reproducing all kinds of media and being used as a communications and entertainment device, a computer’s original function and an understanding of how they worked has been lost to all but the few who used computers over a generation ago. We all take them for granted. One of the earliest and most common uses of a PC was to run a cash register in a store.

Today when a photographer begins shopping for a computer there aren’t any that are designated as digital photography models. Nearly all personal computer today can deal with photographic images to some middling effect, and none are attributed with any special photographic abilities. Maybe that is just as well because a photographer shopping for a computer maybe should be looking for the one key part of a computer system that is “graphic”, and that is its display. LCD displays that are designed and made for graphics computing are few, rare and relatively expensive models.

So, a photographer looking for a computer to do digital photography should first select the best graphics LCD display that can be afforded, and it may cost more than you need to pay for the rest of the computer system. Then get a personal computer to run the display. It can be quite modest  because digital photography processing and editing involves very little “computing” because photos are not the result of a calculation. The only factors in the computer that are important to photography are a good quality 2D video (card), and the addition of as much RAM as can be afforded.

This may sound like a radical idea from a computer geek’s perspective, but it works for me and many other photographers. What few people realize is that there are hundreds of millions of computers used in offices, institutions and now most homes have a computer or two. But the number of people who are serious digital photography users can be counted in the thousands. That is a radically small part of the computer market, too small to even be considered a niche market. There aren’t any computers made especially for digital photography, so do it yourself. 

Which LCD displays should a photographer shop for. Well I have written about the few I can recommend in past articles in Shutterbug, as well as mentioned in my Digital Help column and this blog. But I am currently considering adding another make and model, but also dropping one model from my list. So keep tuned in, that update will appear soon.  

“TAKING THE DIGITAL OUT OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY”

What does the quoted title of this blog mean to you? Does it mean you as a photographer don’t really want to do photographs digitally, but do? Does it mean photographers using digital photography don’t understand what digital means? Or does it mean you need to buy a product that makes digital photography look like film photography?

Today digital photography is primarily color imaging, so I must ask another question. Did film photographers of the past using color films really understand the color photography process, or was it done for them without their attention? I think for many the latter is true. If that is the case it’s because photographers used labs to process and print color photographs, so rarely did processing and printing themselves and the result was they did not understand the color photography process. So with digital and a computer photographers have access to the color reproduction process yet few understand how it works. And to some extent because their photographs are on their computer’s they feel they must deal with them. But if they do not understand either the film color photo process or its digital correlate, they want someone to make it easy without having to learn anything. Am I guessing right or wrong?

I am a professional and was taught how both the black and white and color photographic reproduction process works. But honestly after getting out of photo school I did not process my color film, nor did I make my own color prints because it was very difficult, time consuming and required experts doing that work every day to get good results. Although there were exceptions most of my colleagues used one of many pro color labs in my city during the film era. So maybe many of those who did not get a photography education in the days of film may be a bit short on understanding how the photographic process works. However, the basic principles of the photographic process are fairly simple and have not changed because we moved from film to a digital sensor, so why not learn what was missed?

When the first affordable color monitors became available I got a new PC as I had been using a computer on loan from my magazine company. So I was already a bit computer literate in ’89 when I started to explore and understand color imaging with a computer paint program. I gradually learned that digital imaging is simple and predictable because it is all numerical and logical. That was so unlike the complicated endless variables of the film photography world when each make and model of film reproduced reality differently, and each film emulsion batch too; and even though pro labs were good they would also vary on some days and if someone had a bad hangover it was a goof-up time you couldn’t get done over.

So why anyone would prefer the old film world photography and want to avoid digital makes no sense to me at all.  Computer editing has made photography for me so much easier, simpler and predictable. I enjoy the art and craft of making photographs so much more since I began doing it digitally because I now get the image I intended and hoped for but often missed at least by a bit on film. Now I can fix that, and find I am a better photographer than I thought I was in the past. 

I CHANGE MY MIND OCCASIONALLY

I have gotten into numerous discussions about how to securely save digital image files. My method of using gold-gold CDR discs for this purpose has not altered, I have an established system  so making a change would not serve me well. But the only alternative in the past I could recommend were then expensive RAID-1 mirrored hard drives. They are now affordable, so are a reasonable alternative. This came to my attention in a MacWorld report I received via e-mail, featuring  a Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual mini 640 GB external drive for as little as $180.

So first of all I should explain what a mirrored RAID-1 external hard drive is and how it works. In this instance it is actually two 320GB hard drives in a single enclosure. So you have two identical hard disk drives that total 640GB. When in mirrored RAID-1 mode any data files saved to the system is stored twice, identically on each separate hard disk. This provides the security  that if one drive fails, it can be replaced physically with a new one, then all of the data on the remaining drive is copied to the new one. The chance that both RAID-1 drives would fail at the same time is very remote, so you have a good assurance that your data will remain secure.

Although the source for these Mercury Elite drives is Other World Computing, at www.macsales.com, and is an Apple related hardware and software supplier. The OWC web site indicates the Mercury Elite drives are both PC and Mac compatible. These drives have FireWire 800 and 400 connections, and in this interface are Bus powered, as well as USB 2.0 and eSATA, with an input for DC power when the bus powered FireWire interface is not used.  A selection of five different sized and configured RAID-1 drives are listed by OWC with combined capacities of 640GB to 2.0TB with prices listed from $180 to $319.

So today if someone asks me for a way to safely store digital photo files I can give them a choice of affordable RAID-1 drives or gold-gold CDR discs. Personally if I were beginning now I might very well choose a RAID-1 drive. But I will go along with that old saying, if it isn’t broken don’t fix it. My old gold-gold CDR system still works fine for me. 

COLOREYES DISPLAY EZ HOOD

I don’t know about you, but I often relied on sunglasses, “shades” when I was driving west in the afternoon. They helped a lot to see the road clearly reducing the extraneous direct light from the sun obscuring my view. The same idea applies to your LCD display. If you keep it shaded from extraneous light in the room where your computer is set-up you will see the image on screen more clearly and free from different and conflicting strays of light. Even in my north-facing room that’s dedicated as my lab, even with special Fobsun LED  lamps for my environment lighting, and with a hood protecting the screen, my new Dell Ultrasharp U2410 has a cleaner, brighter screen image now that it has shades.

After receiving quite a number of e-mails from readers that have gotten this new Dell LCD display, a couple included a question, is there a hood made for this LCD display? All I could immediately think of is the EZ Hood ColorEyes began offering not long ago. However I have not used this EZ Hood, so I sent for one. I got it and found it only took about 20 minutes to assemble and install it on the Dell U2410, and it fits very nicely. Immediately I noticed my screen image looked clearer and a better reproduction of what I was working with on the computer. So, even in my rather idealized lab, the advantage of the EZ Hood was apparent. If you have a more typical room where your computer is located, I would suspect you would benefit more from the stray light protection of the EZ Hood, and your display will look even better.

From what I understand the EZ Hood was designed to fit recent Apple iMacs, so it is constructed to fit several sizes including both the 22 inch and 24 inch LCD displays I have recommended. It is made from a black plastic double sided corrugated paneling, so it is both rigid and very light, the shipping weight is just 3 pounds. ColorEyes price is $49.50 which is a lot less than I have paid for hoods for displays, although today few display companies offer hoods custom made for their displays, with the exception of LaCie.

So if like most of us and your computer work area is a compromise and stray light falls on the display surface, you will get better performance from the display with a hood. It is a very effective add-on accessory. So go to www.integrated-color.com, and take a look for yourself.

NEW EPSON R2000 INKJET PHOTO PRINTER

Almost every day I see announcements of new stuff, and I just pass along because it’s not anything I need. Better quality and more efficient printing of my images will stop me in my tracks. Specially when this new Epson R2000 is an improvement on the Epson R1900 the printer I use most. 

It doesn’t look all that different, a box with a paper input on top and output in the front. But although this new R2000 has the same inkset colors that to me are the best for reproducing the kinds of photographs I make, it has a new printhead like its bigger pro brethren, and larger ink cartridges. Yes its a 13 inch wide printer and designed to handle all types of media including printable DVD and CD-R discs, with brilliant long lasting pigment colors.

I’ve been a very satisfied owner of an Epson R1900 printer, so in a way a new replacement model could be a scary proposition. Does this new R2000 do everything my R1900 has done for me? One new thing that has been added is besides the usual wire USB and ethernet connections is you can now print with the R2000 using a WiFi 802.11N wireless connection. So since many of us with broadband use a wireless router we can connect with this new R2000 with WiFi making where we locate this printer easy and convenient.

Some may question my interest because the R1900 and R2000 do not have support for B&W printing, but I have been able to print grayscale images quite accurately simply by changing the file mode to RGB that does support a color managed print that is quite neutral gray, or I can add a sepia tint if I like. And with Epson;s Ultrachrome Hi-Gloss2 ink I am not concerned the neutrality of the gray will shift because of any ink age effect. The R2000 prints should be as archival as any digital photo print can be.

At a $499 list price this new Epson R2000 should be the most affordable access to professional level inkjet printing of the highest quality that will be available. But I will not know that from experience until I receive an R2000 from Epson to use and test for my report on this new product in Shutterbug.