Preserved Topic: LCD monitor for professionals?

For the last couple of years I've had the enormous privilege of working with a monster of a 21" NEC monitor. Now, due to space shortage I've been forced to get rid of my beloved monster and I have yet to find a worthy substitute.

I'm very tempted to get a flat LCD monitor to gain maximum desktop space. However, the only LCD monitors I've found at reasonable prices (around $5-600 in my case) have only been available with a 16 million color depth.

As I work with Photoshop on a daily basis I need a little more punch than that... or do I? In my experience you can't detect small imperfections and color variations with a High Color (16bit) setting. Am I wrong? Could 16 million colors be enough or are there 32bit color LCD screens available that I have missed?

you're seriously confused with your bits.

16,7 million colors -> 24/32 bits (2^24, actually, = 16777216) (the 8 bits are just so that it aligns better in off-the-shelve memory -> cheaper/faster graphics adaptors)

16 bit => 65k colors.

and yes, 16 bit is a few bits to few.

but the usual graphics adaptor can only output 24 bit (16,7 million colors).

Yes, you are confused.

4-bit = 2^4 = 16 colors
8-bit = 2^8 = 256 colors
16-bit = 2^16 = 65,536 colors
24-bit = 2^24 = 16,777,216 colors
32-bit = same as 24 bit, with an added 8-bit alpha channel.

mhmm you could go with the lg 1710b
oh and you may also check my report about tft screens

PORTFOLIO0

IMHO Samsung is better than LG. In overall performance and design...

yes the new samsung is great too. unfortunately their response time is not below 25 ms....at least of the big ones.

PORTFOLIO0

Thanks for clearing that up for me. I've always been fuzzy on what the actual meaning behind the different bit settings were.

So anyway, are you saying that 16 million colors (24 bit) is enough for professional image manipulation/creation?

Uh...did you read those above posts...

16 million colours is the highest you can currently get...so it'd better be good enough for prefessional editing. Besides..the human eye can't detect the difference between closely matched colours anyway, colours 1,435,322 and 1,435,323 will look exactly the same to us.

No need to be rude. I read it.
If you can't tell the difference between 24 and 32 bit, then what is it for? That's all I'm saying. Also, even if you screen has maximum capability it's no guarantee. I only have limited experience with LCD screens but I have my laptop set to 32 bit and it's far from good enough. Excellent for word processing, surfing etc but not for image editing.

Your graphics card may be able to support 32 bit colour, but can your laptop's monitor? Becuase most latop monitors don't support the full range simply to keep weight, size and cost down. And if the eye can't tell the difference between 24 and 32 bit it doesn't matter...becuase in terms of number of colours displayed there is no difference! (see...all this has already been said in this thread). 32 bit is exactly the same as 24 bit except that 32 bit has an extra 8 bit alpha-channel to help it work better with crappier GPUs or monitors.

And i'm sorry about being rude about it, but you're just asking questions again that you've already asked earlier in this thread, and that gets tedious very quickly.

I'm sorry if it seems to you like I'm asking the same question over and over. If I am, it's only because the answers weren't telling me what I needed to know. If you don't feel like answering stupid questions then just ignore them. Forums like these are for asking questions, stupid or otherwise, aren't they?

Anyway, to get back on topic: Obviously I know nothing about hardware, that should be painfully obvious by now. It's confusing to me that the highest setting means one thing on one screen and something completely different on another.

My laptop has a 15" Ultra XGA Display
Other spec. are:
Screen Type active matrix (TFT)
Native Resolution 1600 x 1200 pixels
No. of Colors 16.7 million
MegaPixels 1.92 Mpixels
Pixel Pitch 0.190 mm
Luminance/ Brightness (typical) 150 cd/m2 (nits)
Horizontal Viewing Angle +/- 40 degrees
Vertical Viewing Angle +10/-30 degrees
Contrast Ratio 250:1

The video card is a 32MB DDR nVidia® GeForce4? 440 Go AGP 4X Graphics
Other spec:
Memory 32 MB DDR RAM
Controller NVIDIA® GeForce4 Go(TM)
Controller Speed 220MHz
AGP Bus Speed 4X
Data Width 128-bit
Dedicated Video Processing Engine Yes
RAMDAC 350MHz
Maximum Resolution 1600 x 1200
TV Out Yes
Extended Desktop Yes
Simulscan Mode Yes

Most of the above is just jabberwocky to me. All I know is that the colors sure are crispy but the color depth is not enough to detect small color variances.

PS. Sorry if I sound testy as well. I'm a designer, not a hardware guru. If this forum doesn't tolerate stupid questions then I'll take them somewhere else the next time.

No Silicon Heaven? Preposterous! Where would all the calculators go? - Kryten

BlueH, exactly what type of PS/image-work are you doing?

Is it magazine, books, video, posters?

I think it would be easier to clear out exactly what you need and how to help if we knew that.

From a personal perspective I tend to not use my laptop-screen for more demanding PS-work since it's so easy to miss out on colours due to backlight, angle etc. However I've got it connected to a "stationary" TFT and everything works out just fine. I've used that setup to do colour corrections and so on on pretty complex images used for hires (150-175lpi) poster printing.

My work is 70% webgraphics & interface design (icons, splashscreens etc). I also do vecrotized and rasterized work for print in all kinds of color supplements and media (logos, CD/DVD covers, posters, magazine layouts).
For this I use Photoshop, InDesign, IconWorkshop, Draw! and a bunch of other products.

A monitor I've been thinking about getting is the LG L1710B, which I've heard good things about and seen in action. However, it's one thing to try something out very quickly and quite another to live and work with it for a long time. Maybe the calibtation was off but I felt doubtful that it would respond well to Photoshop's color settings for example.

No Silicon Heaven? Preposterous! Where would all the calculators go? - Kryten

to explain the 32bit/24 bit mysterie a bit more...


there are at least two 32bit image modes
-in one, 8 bits are used for an alpha channel - ie. to control transparency. but of course, that's just software
-in the other, commonly used in graphics adapters, it's a speed/cost improvment. It has to do with how most memory modules are set up, and boils down to the fact that reading 32 bit from the memory on your graphics card is cheaper, and sometimes even faster, than reading just 24 bits.