"factory-calibrated" monitor - do I still need my ColorMunki?

[loonsailor]

I've been using a NEC 2690WUXi monitor for a number of years.  I run a calibration every few months with NECs software and my ColorMunki, which both updates the monitor's LUT and creates a icc profile.  I've just ordered a new Benq PD3225u, which claims to "feature meticulous factory calibration, so designers make full use of total display color accuracy from the get-go".  They also provide icc profiles for the monitor.  OK, cool, I guess.  Does this mean that I no longer need my trusty old ColorMunki?  Is the monitor color likely to drift, and should I therefore run my own calibrate periodically to create new icc profiles or is that unnecessary?  (I don't think this monitor has an addressable internal LUT, so I can't do anything about that.)

FWIW, I'll use it with my Mac Studio.

[digitaldog]

It matters greatly IF you want the calibration to be custom configured based upon some need, like perhaps matching your prints in a defined print viewing condition. See:
High resolution: http://digitaldog.net/files/Why_are_my_prints_too_dark.mp4
Low resolution: https://youtu.be/iS6sjZmxjY4

[Kyle D Jackson]

Wow I'm impressed your NEC 2690 was still useable after all this time. I went thru 2 of them, both replaced under warranty, eventually they gave me a PA271 and that went too. The LCD backlighting just didn't last, so they lost uniformity and brightness, couldn't be calibrated anymore. Seems heat-induced. I still use it as a second display for general stuff but its colour-critical days are long done. Hardware woes aside, the NEC calibration system (SpectraView software + puck) was good and I greatly miss elements of it now that I'm using Eizo's package.

So in your case you're stepping down from a pro colour-critical display to a "dumb" display. I just waded thru an unreal amount of marketing fluff on their website to conclude that. At best they pay a little more attention to image QC than for other products. (I didn't see any mention about their actual panels or backlight, which I think says a lot.) I also saw some kind of option to pay them hundreds of dollars to calibrate your specific unit (read: make an ICC profile for you). But in the end, it's not tunable, and the best you can do is load a custom ICC profile for it if you have one.

So yeah I think you'd definitely want do your own profiling, and update it regularly. Best you can do is put it in the desired user settings (emulated colour space, brightness, etc) and then profile it to update your ICC profile. If its going to drift over time (which should be expected), you'll have no closed-loop way of bringing it back to the same condition like you did with the NEC, just some crude manual adjustments. But hey if you ever lived the CRT days then you already know the drill haha 

Depending on your use case, and how well the monitor performs, maybe that's good enough.

I'm curious tho, since I did my last monitor purchase 3~4 yrs ago, what led you to this sort of monitor after using a colour-critical display like the NEC? I'm out of date on what's left on the market now.

Cheers

[Chris Kern]

I've had very good luck with my NEC monitors.  I purchased a PA-272 back in 2015 and a PA-243 in 2018 to use for post-processing, and they both still work fine and calibrate properly with SpectraView.  I even still have a working 2012 PA-241 that I relegated to the basement to use with my printer after it developed a cosmetic defect that left a smudge on the screen; it also is able to display colors accurately, although since I perform soft-proofing on the other two monitors I only occasionally calibrate it.  I don't know what I will do for a replacement if (when) one of the two editing monitors fails.  I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I've never understood the claims some manufacturers make regarding "factory calibration."  First of all, isn't calibration always dependent on what parameters the user wants?  And since I started doing my own printing, it's been my understanding (thanks to information on Andrew's website) that the response of all monitors changes over time and that they should be re-calibrated on a regular basis.

[loonsailor]

I'm curious tho, since I did my last monitor purchase 3~4 yrs ago, what led you to this sort of monitor after using a colour-critical display like the NEC? I'm out of date on what's left on the market now.

Cheers

Thanks, Kyle.  Several things led me to this monitor.  First, I don’t know nearly as much about this as you seem to, so ignorance may play a role - so maybe it’s just  a mistake.  But…. I wanted something bigger, and due to the size of the space where monitor needs to sit, this was one of the very few >30” that fits.  Photo editing and printing is now maybe 5% of my use of the monitor.  So having an all purpose monitor, rather than a much more expensive color critical one that would need to be smaller due to my space constraint seems like a compromise that’s at least worth trying.  Also, I was thinking that just being 10 years newer, maybe it’s just enough better that the color stability would do the trick for me.  It does get lots of positive reviews, though more of those are from videographers than from photogs.  We’ll see.  Anyway, I guess I’ll hang on to my ColorMunki, or maybe replace it with a calibrite if necessary.

[Kyle D Jackson]

@loonsailor , that's fair, was just curious. I think if it's getting used for something critical enough, you'll want to keep the spectro and profile it regularly. That still won't prevent any "drift" it might have over time tho (at the same settings), so hopefully its stability is sufficient.


@Chris Kern yeah the NEC was generally really good, but I suspect I got stuck with a rolling wave of return/"refurb" lemons. The first 2690 started showing dark coloured "smear/smudge" pattern on the screen at about 2 yrs. They replaced it with a 2nd 2690 that was already very used and it did worse within months (the log indicated it had ~5600 hrs). So they replaced that with a PA271 "upgrade". That one held up much longer, almost 8 yrs of full-time use as my only monitor before it wouldn't calibrate anymore because of fading backlight (~19000 hrs). It's now over 22000 hrs still crawling along in general desktop duty (but it's soooo dim now). I'd love to repair it, or even LED conversion, but it's not so simple on these screens if we want to continue using it for colour critical work.

If I were smart I'd leave the "new" Eizo (now 4yrs old  ~8700 hrs) powered off except for actual colour-crit / imaging work to help preserve it's lifetime, and just use a regular display for general use. I'm not smert tho

[Lessbones]

As long as you're using color management aware applications and the monitor's native white point and gamma aren't SIGNIFICANTLY different from your targets, you can get quite good calibration out of monitors that don't have the ability to hold built in LUTs.  There's even a way to apply 3DLUTs system-wide in Windows (of all places) these days using a program called "dwm_lut".  I've been doing color critical work for years using regularly updated DisplayCal profiles on monitors that don't have built in calibration capabilities-- personally I find the probe-matching (spectrophotometer->colorimeter) capabilities of displaycal/argyllcms to be far more valuable than the calibration system built into NEC monitors.  Eizo does have this ability, and it can make a pretty significant difference in white calibration.

I've never seen a monitor of any caliber match a print well enough to really trust it, and it doesn't make sense that any emissive technology COULD ever match a reflective print in any seriously significant way because physics.  I'm assuming you've got a colormunki display and not the spectro version, since you compared it to what calibrite makes (they only took the colorimeters from x-rite, not the spectros) so honestly, you probably don't need to upgrade that.  The glass filters in the variations of the i1display3 really don't wear out in any appreciable way, so as long as you can still find compatible software you'd basically just be buying the same hardware again.  I have an i1d3 from 2012 and a calibrite colorchecker display pro from 2022 and they're basically identical-- and without matching to a spectro, or at least using an appropriate spectral correction file, you're really not getting the full benefit of it anyway.

Unless someone comes out with a high-res display spectro at commodity pricing soon, us mere mortals won't have any real way of validating whether or not our display measuring devices are working properly because of how narrow the spectra are on OLEDs and even the backlights of a lot of newer LCDs.... the reason I abandoned using the NEC software was because of the annoyingly pinkish white-point I always felt like I was seeing with an NEC PA271Q-- turns out it has a PFS phosphor backlight-- the red phosphor is very narrow and spiky, giving good red saturation, but also therefore not being compensated for by low-res spectros like the i1pro.  Once I started using a visual match to an older display's D65 white point it became comfortable to use...

Basically all this rambling is to say that display calibration is like most sciences-- the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't know.  But the more you KNOW you don't know, the more you can work with with what you do know... ya know?

[digitaldog]

I've never seen a monitor of any caliber match a print well enough to really trust it, and it doesn't make sense that any emissive technology COULD ever match a reflective print in any seriously significant way because physics. 

It is why the Simulate paper white/ink Black options in very, very few products make the image look pretty awful compared to without. And yes, a good print-to-display match becomes a possibility—one that can be trusted by some. It isn't perfect, but it can be darn useful.
"Have no fear of perfection-you'll never reach it."  -Salvador Dali
Oh, no issues with 'pink' on my PA271Q.