Well my wife needs to buy a new monitor for photoshop.
Now for laptops and the like I don't mind buying from specs alone, but monitors are what you stare at all day so in general I'd like to actually look at them first maybe even plug a laptop in and view my pictures but all the usual places (PC World, John Lewis), generally only stock a limited number of Monitors which are fairly generic and likely not suitable for the kind of work my wife does.
Does anybody know of a good shop in the SE that actually has loads of different models on display?
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I use a dell ultrasharp display which is high res and close to Adobe colour spectrum, but is much harder to calibrate compared to eizo. If you're a pro, an eizo is best every time.
Failing that, might be worth trying WEX photographic - they have monitors but not sure if on display...
Why?
Well, the reason I got it was for print proofing for large prints - it was absolutely fantastic for this, loading an image into photoshop, duplicating and applying a printer's profile to one so I could re-edit to correct anything that went weird (typically reds in skins, clipping in greens). You can *never* match as far as I could tell, but you could get the image closer.
However, it's harder to calibrate as it's an "affordable" wide range colour. Also, what colour space do you export to? Srgb? Most people do. I did use some cymk printers but even that is pretty well covered by an Srgb monitor as far as I could see.
So what did I gain through Adobe rgb? Well, I could make images look stunning on *my* monitor. Once exported to Srgb it would have a colour profile applied in the metadata to get it looking good - however, you need to use a colour managed programme to view (such as Adobe Bridge). If not, you'll get a horribly skewed, oversaturated image (such as Windows photos).
Basically, I have a wide colour gamut screen that I now use in rgb mode all the time because it works for every scenario and I know exactly how my image will look on, say, a mobile phone.
If you print professionally a lot, it's worthwhile going wider but if it's online and screen based, I wouldn't waste your money.