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Okay, I'm a glutton...

Don Libby

Well-known member
Jack - the monitor is amazing as is the resolution. I finished upgrading one of my NVIDA graphics card from a 285 to 295 so now I have 1 285 running my Wacom and TV while the 295 is running my 24" and 30". No real issues that wasn't my own doing in upgrading the system and the end result was well worth the effort.

Yes I'm a glutton and a damn proud one at that :D


Don
 

GrahamWelland

Subscriber & Workshop Member
I'm running with an Apple 30in Cinema display, Lacie 19in display and a 21in Cintiq. In my case the challenge has been with matching luminosity across all monitors despite calibration with my ColorMunki.

The other consideration for me has been the amount of free slots in my MacPro. I have been using 2x Radeon 1900XT cards which unfortunately consume 3 slot spaces in my MacPro. I now have 2x RAID cards which consume slots 3&4 which has necessitated removing one of the Radeons and return to a dual display set up. I now need to look at replacing the video cards to single slot sized versions - I prefer cards from the same manufacturer (& versions) after some horrible interops in the past, even under OS X.
 
Finally picked up this monitor but finding it a bit fiddly to calibrate -- Seems too blue or too red, when we get what looks like a clean neutral the reds look way oversaturated. This is using Native Color Profile with all other settings at default in SpectraView. sRGB Emulation is the only profile that allows untagged images and backgrounds(like the red on the Netflix home page) to appear without being oversaturated. We just found the Gamma in Nvidia Control Panel was set to 1.0 so we set it to 2.2 and recalibrated -- same result, and then when we switch profiles Nvidia goes back to a gamma of 1.0. Anyone have some tips for calibration starting points?
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Hi Dave,

Sorry I missed this, not sure why. Anyway, I did look at the Eizo, and the one I though was visually superior to the NEC was the ColorEdge 301W -- and it was twice the price and I simply could not justify that extra expense. I found the lesser Eizo FlexScan to not have a very even display backlight and so steered away from it. But that was me and YMMV...
 
Jack, this is the NEC 30" referenced above in post #36. Since you had the same monitor I thought I'd see if you had any setup tips. The oversaturation is really bugging my wife.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Okay, now I understand, sorry.

Yes, because the gamut is so wide, websites that run in sRGB will look oversaturated. You get used to that, but it takes a week or so. What counts is how color managed images look inside a color managed software like Photoshop or CaptureOne -- here is where the large gamut monitors shine, especially when soft-proofing. But yes, website shopping online is a hassle because lots of things are the wrong color ;)
 
Thanks Jack, at least now I know we're not crazy... at least not WRT this issue :) My wife is not a "get used to it" kind of person, a real perfectionist. Looks like she'll be flipping between sRGB emulation for surfing and coding and "Native" for color work.
 
J

jcoffin

Guest
It's worth noting that some browsers do color management, and others don't. Google Chrome doesn't. Apple Safari does. At least the last time I looked at it, Internet Explorer did not. Firefox can, but (depending on version) can/does disable it by default.

There are plug-ins you can get to enable it, or you can enable it manually: enter "about:config" in the address bar. This will bring up a "Filter" at the top of the page, followed by a *long* list of settings (most of which you definitely don't want to play with). Enter "color_management" in the filter, and you should get (at least) three settings (each will have "color_management" on the beginning):

mode: usually set to 1 (full color management), 2 is to manage only tagged photos (and 0 turns it off completely).
rendering intent: 0 is perceptual, 1 is relatively colorimetric (2 and 3 are saturation and absolute colorimetric, but I can't imagine anybody wants either...)
display_profile: You can enter a path to your monitor's profile

If memory serves, when mode is set to 1, it assumes that anything that isn't tagged is sRGB, so most colors don't get so horribly over-saturated.

These won't even come close to fixing everything, of course, but at least they can make quite a few things noticeably less problematic. Of course, you quickly learn to be annoyed with sites that claim to be for photographers, but strip color profiles out of uploaded photos...
 
Thanks JC, we'll definitely try those. She's a bit more relaxed about the whole thing knowing that her new machine that she is still building will have better color management as it is Win7-64 instead of XP.

For the gear junkies, that machine is an i7 Quad 3GHz with 24G of RAM, mirrored SSD drives for the OS and a 4TB 5-disk RAID 5 for data. Yes, I'm jealous. :D
 
J

jcoffin

Guest
Thanks JC, we'll definitely try those. She's a bit more relaxed about the whole thing knowing that her new machine that she is still building will have better color management as it is Win7-64 instead of XP.

:D
[Edit: I should probably warn that this post has a rather negative tone -- I apologize, but the mention of Windows 7 color management hit a truly raw nerve with me...]

I wish that were true (and I certainly wish you the best), but my experience has been that Win7's color management is almost stupidly confusing. To me it seems pretty much a given that people who care about color profiles mostly think graphically and work best with pictures. Win7's profile setup runs directly opposite that -- it's the driest list of pure text possible, with labels for things that seem to have been specifically designed to assure that 1) they don't fit any existing terminology, and 2) nobody can be certain what any of them is really supposed to mean.

Given the general idea of how color profiles work, it seems to me that the right way to do things would be to draw a block diagram of the machine, and let the user attach a profile to a device (or perhaps the line connecting one device to another). For example, I'd like to see something like this:



As it is, however, I get this:



I know more than most about both color management and computers/software, but I can't make heads or tails of most of that. It seems to have entries to let me modify things that I can't imagine wanting to change, but none to change any of the things I do want to (like telling it what profile to use for which printer). There are more tabs to that window, but none that seems to really fit at all well with actual color management.

Having WCS is a great idea -- but at least to me, the current implementation seems to fall squarely into the "What were they thinking?" category.
 
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Yeah, it looks like a mess, but hopefully she will be able to make something of it. We'll update after we get the monitor hooked to the Win7 machine and have some time to play with it. She's still building that machine, lots of apps to be installed still.
 
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