One of the most important tools for any digital photographer is a high quality computer monitor. There are many capable ‘standard monitors’ out there (the kinds we can buy for less than $200), but then there are the professional-quality monitors designed for imaging work—these range from several hundred dollars to thousands of dollars in price. It’s immediately clear that they form a completely different class of equipment.
Having done considerable photographic work on standard monitors in past years, I can personally attest to the value of using a professional monitor for serious imaging work. The best on-line introductory guide I’ve found for this kind of monitor is by Jeremy Daalder of Image Science in Melbourne.
What are the benefits of paying for such an expensive piece of equipment? The most important benefit is accuracy. A professional monitor, once properly calibrated, will display colours accurately and consistently—to a far greater degree than even the best standard monitors. This is critically important if you want to be able to edit your images accurately.
Perhaps a simple analogy is appropriate here. Imagine that your eyes are unreliable. Sometimes, everything has a very slight green tint, and at other times, everything has a very slight red tint, compared to reality. Brightness can also vary slightly—sometimes a bit brighter, and sometimes a bit darker. Imagine that you are editing images on your computer with eyes like these. Of course, at any given moment, you’ll edit the images so that they look ‘right’ to you, but when you come back to the images the next day, they all look too dark, or they have a strange tint to them. Without good eyes, you won’t be able to produce consistent, high quality images. Currently, the reality is that standard monitors are like these unreliable eyes. They’re more than good enough for office work and basic image editing, but not for high quality imaging work.
In the realm of advanced amateur to mainstream professional digital photography, Eizo and NEC would be the best known companies making monitors specifically for imaging work. Anyone who’s had a long association with computers will remember NEC’s pioneering MultiSync monitors from the 1980s, which had a widespread reputation for excellence, but Eizo is a name probably less well known to most. Historically, Eizo has had higher quality and much higher prices than NEC, but things would be a lot closer these days.
After a suitable camera and lens, a high quality monitor is probably the next most important piece of equipment for digital photography. If you haven’t come across this topic before, but are serious about your photographic work, I think you’ll immediately understand what I’m saying.