As many of you know I'll be a non-county employee come July 1st, 2008 and I'm looking at working in the web development and design fields (after some further training and edjumucations). Ironically enough I got a brand new LCD monitor at work today and I noticed that the color spectrum and brightness kick the ass of my old LCD monitor.

Since I'll have to upgrade my home computer for freelance work I got to wondering what monitors are recommended for the web design (and/or image editing) field?

Any expert recommendations on monitors for the PC world? Would a 1600x1200 native resolution be adequate for this type of work? On a similar vein what about video card recommendations? For using CS3 does it matter much?

I'm no expert at this either, so I'll tag a question onto Tofu's post.

I have a Dell monitor, 20" but not WS. I have it set to 1600x1200 resolution, looks good to me. Is there a particular resolution that you guys would recommend working with?

I have 2 - 22" Dell widescreen monitors (connected via DVI cables to a high end graphics card) and that seems to work fine for me.

I wouldnt mind picking up a monitor calibrator (like Spyder?), but the default settings seem to work well.

I recently ranted about it somewhere. The default settings on the new LCD monitors are in serious conflict color/contrast-wise with calibrated CRT monitors.

It all boils down to what are you using it for. If you work pre-press, the colors are critical. Your monitor has to be calibrated to display colors as close as possible the output on the device you're printing (offset press, printer, etc.) and other professional monitors. You want to be sure that that particular fancy shade of blueish green that you see on the monitor is going to match in print and not turn out to be purple. Color calibration software and devices are a must (for monitor, desktop printer, etc) and you get lost in the intangible mess of Color Management settings.

Web-graphics - I guess you go with the flow, aiming at the myriad of different monitors in the world, most of them displaying slightly different colors.

Resolution - run LCDs at their native resolution, CRTs at the maximum they can keep up with (at 75Hz min)

Amen to that!!! Oh, I hate color management issues!!!

Is it easy to calibrate the monitor to the printer? Because you have just articulated the stuff of my nightmares!

The short answer is 'no', there is no easy way. Some printers ship with good enough profiles to get at least some consistency.

You shouldn't match your monitor to your printer. Chances are that both your printer and your monitor will be off, then things that you see on your screen will look very different on somebody else's monitor or print very different on other printers. Best case scenario - all your devices (monitors, printers, scanners, digital cameras) are calibrated to some industry standard and then WISYWIG will come true

The complete solutions (hardware + software) are rather expensive. At least get a starter monitor colorimeter and take it from there (a huey or a ColorSpider for about $80).

X-Rite makes the EZcolor bundle that should work for a budget solution (includes a monitor colorimeter, a color target and uses your scanner in lieu of a designated color patch reader) for about $500 (there's a similar solution from ColorVision) . You can go crazy with other professional packages ranging from the $1500s to the high $5000s

What is your budget?

NEC SpectraView range have a wide colour gamut and can do 101% Adobe RGB

http://www.trustedreviews.com/displays/review/2005/11/18/NEC-SpectraView-Reference-21-LCD2180WG-LED-/p1


...but you can pick up really great 21 inch CRT's now for peanuts.

20 inch at 1600x1580, 32-bit color 60 Hertz HP flat Panel. Two EVGA GeForce 8800 Ultra Video Card on SLI ... got them from newegg for $300 each plus a $50 off mail in. I did manage to upgrade my ram to OCZ Quad Kit Platinum 8192MB for $200 on tigerdirect... but had to get a 64bit copy of vista b/c the 32 would only support 4gigs.

All and all this computer runs like a charm.

Are you planing on building a computer from scratch?

I'm probably going to build the PC from scratch rather than buy a prefabbed box. Until July I won't know for sure but I'm thinking around $2K-$3K for the hardware.

had an lcd. 'downgraded' to a BIG crt. love it, though my desk wobbles under the strain

Me too on the 2-3k thing. (yay government jump-start-the-economy check... that will speed things up a bit!). I'm seriously considering a mac pro, but then Ill need a monitor & some software and... a second job......

2k - 3k? WTF!!!

Get quad Nvidia on xfire. 8 Gigs of memory and solid state drive
( for boot up ) and at least 2 raptors. Asus Mobo of course.

Yes indeedy.

I'm really considering a RAID array controller too.

My monitor is a 19" ASUS (probably Australian brand)

Looks great!