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Author Topic: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"  (Read 6535 times)

SangRaal

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NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« on: January 01, 2013, 04:15:53 pm »

I have decided to bite the bullet and buy a better monitor with dedicated calibration device (after using a Dell ultrasharp 2411 with Spyder calibration). I have decided on an NEC Spectraview II either in 27 inch or 30 inch. Is there any practical difference in usage for photo editing in lightroom/ photoshop (yes I know the 30 incher has slightly higher pixel count)??? Any other choices in momitors that I should consider?
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howardm

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #1 on: January 02, 2013, 01:42:04 pm »

I'm pretty sure the 30 requires Dual link DVI or better.  I've also heard of a fair # of cases where purchasers
were unhappy about backlight spillage around the bezel on the 30"

Andrew Makiejewski

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #2 on: January 02, 2013, 10:40:02 pm »

Hi I bought the PA271W just a little over a year ago and is a great unit. A friend of mine bough the PA301W unit. The PA271W is 2560 x 1440 which is 16:9, the PA301W is 2560 x 1600 which is 16:10. I could not justify the $1000.00 more for that bit and an extra 160 pixels in vertical height and an extra DP input.

If you want to run at the max resolution using DVI then, as stated you will need a Dual-Link cable and capable video card. If you want to make use the of the Adobe RGB colour space then you will need to use the DP(DisplayPort) interface as it is the only one that will give your the 10bit pipeline. DVI only has an  8bit pipeline. You will also need a video card that provides the 10bit pipeline to the monitor. There are only certain cards that provide this. I am using a card based on the nVidia FX1800 chipset.

Purchased the SpectraView software as I already had the X-Rite ColorMonkey Photo device already.

Excellent monitors all around and highly recommended.

Andrew
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Josh-H

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #3 on: January 03, 2013, 07:33:37 am »

Quote
If you want to make use the of the Adobe RGB colour space then you will need to use the DP(DisplayPort) interface as it is the only one that will give your the 10bit pipeline. DVI only has an  8bit pipeline.

Pardon my ignorance - but I have never heard this before (or seen it in any documentation). Where does it say that DVI is only an 8 bit pipeline?
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Tony Jay

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #4 on: January 03, 2013, 07:45:03 am »

Pardon my ignorance - but I have never heard this before (or seen it in any documentation). Where does it say that DVI is only an 8 bit pipeline?
Found this on the net in response to your question:

It's all very well saying a panel is capable of 10-bit colour depth (1.07 billion colour palette) as opposed to an 8-bit colour depth (16.7 million colours), but you need to take into account whether this is practically useable and whether you're ever going to truly use that colour depth. Apart from the requirements of your application, operating system, graphics card and software, one more pertinent limitation is from a display point of view, where there must be an interface which can support 10-bit colour depth. Thankfully the PA271W-SV does include a DisplayPort interface capable of handling a 10-bit colour depth. If you use the DVI interface you can only take advantage of 16.7 million colours.

This is from TFT Central and is part of a review of the PA271W-SV.

I confess that I had no prior awareness of this either.

Tony Jay
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Josh-H

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #5 on: January 03, 2013, 07:55:58 am »

Found this on the net in response to your question:

It's all very well saying a panel is capable of 10-bit colour depth (1.07 billion colour palette) as opposed to an 8-bit colour depth (16.7 million colours), but you need to take into account whether this is practically useable and whether you're ever going to truly use that colour depth. Apart from the requirements of your application, operating system, graphics card and software, one more pertinent limitation is from a display point of view, where there must be an interface which can support 10-bit colour depth. Thankfully the PA271W-SV does include a DisplayPort interface capable of handling a 10-bit colour depth. If you use the DVI interface you can only take advantage of 16.7 million colours.

This is from TFT Central and is part of a review of the PA271W-SV.

I confess that I had no prior awareness of this either.

Tony Jay


This is the first I have ever heard of this and have not seen this substantiated anywhere else. I would be interested to know what Will Hollingworth at NEC has to say on this subject. I am having a hard time believing that if you use DVI you are are not getting the Adobe RGB color space (I can accept the 8 bit vs 10 bit part as thats pretty obvious once you look into it). What about previous models 2690 Wuxi? Am I being told that these models could not display their 93.X% of the Adobe RGB color space because they were not hooked up via display port? Since these monitors only had DVI or VGA this reasoning seems silly to me.

And what happens if you hook up via a display port to DVI adapter?

I find there something screwy with all this and it smells to me of misinformation. Of coure, I stand ready to be corrected. ;D
« Last Edit: January 03, 2013, 08:07:42 am by Josh-H »
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Tony Jay

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #6 on: January 03, 2013, 08:04:58 am »

I can't directly answer your suspicions Josh but the technical information provided in the review was very extensive.
TFT Central is a site devoted to TFT monitor technology.
You will have to check out the info for yourself.

Tony Jay
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Josh-H

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #7 on: January 03, 2013, 08:23:02 am »

Very interesting reading...

Its from the review of the NEC PA271W on TFT Central.

Quote
It's "10-bit" (8-bit + AFRC) panel is combined with a 14-bit 3D Look Up Table (LUT) and extended colour space, along with further technologies to improve uniformity and viewing conditions.

Quote
10-bit Panel - The NEC PA271W utilises a 10-bit (8-bit + AFRC) 'performance IPS' (p-IPS) panel. This is a name given by NEC to the high end 10-bit IPS panels being used in their PA series of screens, but technically the panel remains the same as the so called H-IPS panels in terms of pixel structure. It's still an H-IPS panel produced by LG.Display (the same LM270WQ2 module as used in the Dell U2711 in fact), but NEC have chosen to refer to it as a 'performance IPS' panel, hence the p-IPS. Technically this is an 8-bit panel with Frame Rate Control on the panel side to boost the colour depth to 1.07 billion colours. 10-bit support does require an end to end "10-bit journey" however so it is not always possible to put this into practice. Have a read of this article which discusses it in more detail.

Quote
It's all very well saying a panel is capable of 10-bit colour depth (1.07 billion colour palette) as opposed to an 8-bit colour depth (16.7 million colours), but you need to take into account whether this is practically useable and whether you're ever going to truly use that colour depth. Apart from the requirements of your application, operating system, graphics card and software, one more pertinent limitation is from a display point of view, where there must be an interface which can support 10-bit colour depth. Thankfully the PA271W does include a DisplayPort interface capable of handling a 10-bit colour depth. If you use the DVI interface you can only take advantage of 16.7 million colours.

Well.. I certainly learned something today about panel bit depth.

Edit - snip some relevent sections from the article:

Quote
The bit precision of a panel basically determines how many steps of brightness are possible, with the more steps the better, offering smoother less obvious differences from one step to the next and therefore delivering smoother gradients and less banding or gradation. This is also important where very slight subtle differences occur in shades.

To be honest, an 8-bit panel is easily sufficient for most purposes, and certainly for most general users. It's only really very high end graphics use which would really benefit from 10-bit colour, and even then, only if certain criteria are met. 10-bit technology, with a larger number of steps available between each level of grey can be useful for 3D rendering or in automotive styling for instance, where banding can be evident on 8-bit panels due to a slight detectable change between each step. Where subtle differences are needed, or where gradients are very common, 10-bit colour depth can help avoid banding and bring out detail in close colour tones. For instance, 10-bit colour depth is useful in satellite and medical imagery where precession is vital.
« Last Edit: January 03, 2013, 08:25:46 am by Josh-H »
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D Fosse

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #8 on: January 03, 2013, 10:18:50 am »


I am having a hard time believing that if you use DVI you are are not getting the Adobe RGB color space (...) there something screwy with all this and it smells to me of misinformation.

Adobe RGB has of course nothing to do with it. Someone got confused back there. Of course you can use the full gamut of the monitor with an 8 bit pipeline.
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Graham Welland

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #9 on: January 12, 2013, 03:48:40 am »

I picked up my PA271W-BK last week and added a copy of Spectraview II to go with it since I already had a ColorMunki. So far I'm very impressed with the level of control of Spectraview with this monitor. Colour calibration seems excellent and the wider gamut support is noticeable compared to my other calibrated screens.

There were a few tricks to go through to enable my ColorMunki but a quick google search brought up the details about having to disable the existing X-Rite driver in Mac OS X and all was good.

I can't speak to the 30in but the 27in makes a nice complement alongside my 30in Cinema Display and is certainly a better calibration as you would expect. I like the fine calibration support of Spectraview and I'm just beginning to play with print brightness matching and alternative profiles depending upon the papers I use too. If you already have a supported colorimeter then I think that it makes sense to find a monitor without the software and license it afterwards.

One thing I did notice though is that this seems to have been EOL'd by NEC so if you can find one then there are some good deals out there (also some horrible ones too so buyer beware!).
« Last Edit: January 12, 2013, 03:56:18 am by Graham Welland »
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Tony Jay

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #10 on: January 12, 2013, 04:01:21 am »

I picked up my PA271W-BK last week and added a copy of Spectraview II to go with it since I already had a ColorMunki. So far I'm very impressed with the level of control of Spectraview with this monitor. Colour calibration seems excellent and the wider gamut support is noticeable compared to my other calibrated screens.

It is a good monitor (NEC brand) - arguably the industry standard currently.

Tony Jay
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JRSmit

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #11 on: January 12, 2013, 11:23:38 am »

google the dvi spec as implemented today. it is 8-bit. you need displayport to get to 10-bit.
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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #12 on: January 12, 2013, 01:13:27 pm »

Pardon my ignorance - but I have never heard this before (or seen it in any documentation). Where does it say that DVI is only an 8 bit pipeline?

If you're on a Mac, the entire 10-bit discussion is moot, we don't have support in the OS. That doesn't mean the display still isn't using 10-bits within the panel which IS useful. Unless the entire path is high bit, and even then, the gain is questionable (that is, I've heard Windows users who have produced a true 10-bit path say "so what?"). 
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Steve Weldon

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #13 on: January 12, 2013, 02:09:20 pm »

google the dvi spec as implemented today. it is 8-bit. you need displayport to get to 10-bit.
True.  But you don't need 10 bit to get Adobe98 or other gamuts.
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Graham Welland

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #14 on: January 12, 2013, 02:32:17 pm »

Do folks make any changes to the NEC's monitor settings when using Spectraview or do you leave the monitor as-is and just let the profiling software set all of the settings? I've only had mine a short while and haven't made any changes from the outof box defaults other than setting the brightness value (when I initially profiled it using my Colormunki Photo & software). However, once I got Spectraview I just used that to set the monitor's configuration including brightness etc. I assume that's the best way to do it or are there any recommendations to tweak the monitor via it's menu in addition to Spectraview?
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Tony Jay

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #15 on: January 12, 2013, 05:09:23 pm »

Within the profiling software set the luminance, black point, white point, gamma  etc and then let it do its thing. Simple.
The main thing that I might alter is the luminance - the 140 cd/m2 is way too bright for my working environment.

Tony Jay
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jonathan.lipkin

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Re: NEC SPECTRAVIEW II 27" OR 30"
« Reply #16 on: January 16, 2013, 11:10:12 am »

I use a luminance of 100 for my NEC. I can't recall now why I did it, but I did put quite a bit of thought into it at the time. I think you should try to aim for a luminance where the white on the screen matches the white of your prints in whatever viewing station you have set up.
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