Wide Gamut LCDs for NON-Photo Uses?

[Paul Sumi]

I am a serious amateur photographer researching LCDs to replace my current PC monitor. It would be used for both photographic and general computer use under Windows XP SP2.

I am very interested in the NEC 2690 SV WUXI.  But my understanding is that wide gamut LCDs are NOT the best for use with non-color-managed or sRGB enviroments (Internet, MS Office apps, etc).

I'd like to get feedback from anyone using a wide gamut LCD for general use as well as photo image processing.

My question is whether I am currently better off buying a sRGB LCD at this time (the NEC 2490 would be my choice).

Oh - I know that Windows Vista has better color management and I have also heard that Mac OS X seems to work fine with wide gamut LCDs.  But I'm not prepared to go either route at this time.

Thanks for any help.

Paul

[digitaldog]

This is a great display. 93% of Adobe RGB so yes, pretty wide. Can't comment about the applications you mention, I'm on a Mac and they all behave correctly due to the OS having a clue about all this. Note that a wide gamut display does have disadvantages when it comes time to edit images that easily fall within sRGB (example, bride in white wedding dress). If you're working with imagery that's wide gamut, this is a great display. If you're workings with lower gamut images, the subtle colors are more difficult to view. No free lunch.

[Paul Sumi]

This is a great display. 93% of Adobe RGB so yes, pretty wide. Can't comment about the applications you mention, I'm on a Mac and they all behave correctly due to the OS having a clue about all this. Note that a wide gamut display does have disadvantages when it comes time to edit images that easily fall within sRGB (example, bride in white wedding dress). If you're working with imagery that's wide gamut, this is a great display. If you're workings with lower gamut images, the subtle colors are more difficult to view. No free lunch.
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Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your reply and information.  Still hoping to hear from an Windows PC user.

Paul

[llama]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your reply and information.  Still hoping to hear from an Windows PC user.

Paul
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You shouldn't have any problems at all. I have a normal gamut LCD and an old high-quality CRT (arguably as wide gamut as a wide-gamut LCD as the avg delta is is normally 0.23 with a max of 0.54) that are both calibrated, profiled, and run all types of apps (games, video encoding, video, internet, mail, etc) under XP SP2.

If anything your internet colours will be better and when you play games, the colour profile for the displays appears to unload so as not to make the games too dark.

Loading my monitor profiles is done using the Windows Colour management power toy, which is a free control panel applet you can download from MS.

I use ColourEyesDisplay to build my profiles for your info.

N