Our Monitors
Monitors are something many photographers don’t give too much thought about, until they realize just how important they are. And once you start printing, well, then having a monitor that can be calibrated via hardware instead of just software becomes essential. Thus meriting its own discussion in the Our Gear section.
I give Ann all the credit for doing the research needed to make sure we’re well-set with our monitors. And she’s done a superb job, balancing the desires for results against the needs of using the monitor for work as well as costs. Ann decided (with my concurrence) that we should go with BenQ monitors and it’s been a great choice.
The monitor we have at each of our desks is a BenQ SW270C. As the name suggests, it is a 27” monitor at 1440 p. One of its advantages is that it can reproduce 99% of the Adobe RGB Color Space, which is close to what prints can do. For regular folks, most monitors, phones and iPads use an SRGB color space, which does not come close to rendering the colors of Adobe RGB. This is a monitor designed for photo editing.
As you can see, it comes with its own window shielding to help ensure that the color of the monitor is not disturbed by the color of other light sources in the room, as well as protecting the screen from unwanted glare. They are truly lovely monitors.
We also have a third monitor that’s downstairs. This one is a BenQ SW321C. It’s not only larger at 32”, but has an even higher pixel count and renders in 4K, again in Adobe RGB. Unfortunately, it’s is great for looking at photographs, but not so perfect for use as a working monitor for documents, etc. Some of us aging folks can’t see very fine print too well.
But as you can see, we have it set up downstairs next to our printer so we can hookup our laptops and edit images if we need to.
Now all that technology would be for nothing if we did not calibrate our monitors, which we do every few weeks. The device we use is the X-rite i1 Display.
It may not look like much, but flip it’s protective shield around and you see a lens that leads to the measuring device.
When it’s time to calibrate our monitors, we plug it into the monitor, and turn on the BenQ calibration program.
The software runs through a series of tonal values (to set the monitor brightness at the level we determine - which in our case is set to allow us to print successfully from what we see on the monitor, which happens to also look fine on an iPad screen) and then an extensive array of different colors. Working through the process adjusts hardware in the monitor to reproduce the colors supposedly represented in the images. For our laptops, we use the X-Rite software program and adjust the laptop screens using software instead of hardware.
Given the success we’ve had in reproducing prints, investing in good monitors and calibrating them has paid off in both time and money.
We do love our monitors!