Thank you everyone for your feedback, I do appreciate it.
Ptomsu, do you really find that much difference between the apple and the Eizo?
is it something you can verbalize a bit more please?
pretty much everyone I know locally and studio's I know of uses the silver or (few) older apple cinema displays...
Anyone else?
I'm curious what people use in general
thank you again.
am
I should disclose up front that our company sells a lot of Eizo monitors. So I am clearly biased.
Apple has the dominant marketshare. For most people it is "good enough" quality and they have good brand cache and good design. The difference in Eizo to Apple is remarkable, but remember that the goal of Eizo is to be accurate and consistent, not "stunning" so at first glance the image is often less contrasty, less saturated, and less bright than an Apple monitor even after calibrating both. This is another major reason why many people choose Apple ("it's how much more $$ and it doesnt look as 'good'???).
Also most images do not push the limits of the monitor very hard. Images with subtle shadow detail, long smooth gradations (e.g. open sky), or strongly saturated colors, especially saturated dark red, really test the quality of the monitor.
Two examples:
1) I once spent hours trying to eliminate the posterization/stepping-pattern in the smooth gradiants in one of my
bodyscapes only to realize that the monitor was showing stepping patterns that weren't in the file. Now anytime I retouch such a file I can only do so on an Eizo because stepping patterns CAN appear in these images (I am boosting contrast a lot from the original raw and even in 16 bit that can result in stepping patterns) so I NEED to know whether they are in the file, or only on the monitor. Is this a normal situation? NO! But smooth gradients are not all that uncommon.
2) Another image I have seen monitor issues with was Walter Borchenko's picture of a red boat on a sulky-bland-overcast day; the raw file contained sharp detail on the paint, but it did not show when viewed on an Apple monitor because both the entire section was out-of-gamut for the monitor and therefore had to, by definition, be represented by the same in-gamut color. When viewed on an Eizo you could see every individual stroke of paint. There is no way to print the detail I was seeing AS-IS, but because I knew from the Eizo that it was there I was able to work in soft-proof-mode to increase the contrast and reduce the saturation of the image until the colors came in-gamut for the printer and therefore the paint was printed with detail. If I was preparing that image for print with the Apple I would not have known the detail was there and my workflow would not have included a step to bring the detail in-gamut for the printer.
Finally the easiest way to explain the difference is that I've apart from a set of Eizos I have NEVER seen two monitors connected to the same machine and displaying the same image match each other, no matter what profiling method/hardware is used. They get kinda close, but never match. If you calibrate two Eizos (even if comparing two different models/sizes) using the Eizo software (so that the calibration is changing the monitor response rather than the video card output) they will match perfectly every time.
Doug Peterson (e-mail Me)
__________________
Head of Technical Services, Capture Integration
Phase One, Canon, Apple, Profoto, Eizo & More
National: 877.217.9870 | Cell: 740.707.2183
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