Mike McNamee looks at how to choose and what to choose
Today, many people work graphics in front of two monitors, some people even work in front of three or four! The additional area (or ‘real estate’ as it is termed by geeks) provides space for the panels and palettes so that more area is left free for the image, giving a friendly, uncluttered space to play in. Many people move an older monitor to one side and install a shiny new one in the centre of their desk but what if you are starting from scratch? This brings in a confusing myriad of choices. The situation is further complicated by the presence in the market of monitors which are in 16:9 or 16:10 format. They are unequivocally intended for the home cinema and gaming markets, as usual photographers don’t have enough clout to influence the designs. This leaves us with an ever-present problem, we never have enough pixels in the vertical direction! The ability to rotate today’s screens to the portrait format is a nod in this direction but there are some issues with this. The hood, which is vital for quality judgement, looks a bit silly on the cant (although the CG245W may be rotated). The available height has gone from a bit small to massively over-large; we found it a bit of a strain looking top to bottom over a distance of almost two feet. The final nail in the coffin for us is that once the (rather stiff ) trailing wires have pushed the third cup of coffee onto the carpet, things are getting a bitty sticky on the domestic front! Although we have had rotatable screens for many years we have never used them for long.
How much flat space do you need?
Everybody agrees that more is better, a bit like RAM! However, for spectacle wearers the field of sharp focus might be limited as indicated in the diagram – this is real measurements from your editor’s eyes! This places a limit of around 23 inches of width. Here we run into trouble, monitor-makers, in a desperate attempt to hood-wink us, always quote the diagonal size – it gives the advertising copywriters a bigger number.
A 30-inch monitor in 16:10 format has ‘dimensions’ of about 25.5 x 16 inches (thank you Pythagoras!). Finding the actual size of what you are paying for is rather difficult from manufacturers’ specifications; the best you can do is to take the physical dimensions and subtract the width of the bezel to give you the area of screen that you actually see. For a 30-inch and 27-inch monitor the sizes are roughly 25x16 inches and 23.6x14 inches. With NEC, that additional two inches of height is going to set you back an additional £1,640, almost doubling the cost per diagonal inch. To add insult to injury the additional couple of inches of width is only marginally focused by your editor.
As the diagram shows, twisting a second monitor provides better focus distances; it also provides a massive increase in screen area. The things it does not solve are the pixel height requirements and it also messes up the hood arrangements. In a perfect world, it is better to have the number of pixels of height the same for both monitors, this allows seamless moving of panels across screens – sometimes you run into trouble with the dragged top bar of a panel disappearing into space above the smaller monitor!
A second scenario is to invest in a top-end monitor for the main unit and a budget one for the second, ‘panels’ monitor. Such a possibility might be serviced by choosing a ColourEdge CG 241W (1,920x1,200px) with an Eizo S2100 (1,600x1,200px). This involves an outlay of £1,945 to deliver 38 inches of total screen width, all at 1,200 pixels height. If you are prepared to lose the 1,200 pixels rule and drop to say 1,024 height you could slice quite a few more hundreds of pounds off your outlay.
Setting up
Having selected and purchased your monitors you have other issues to solve. Assuming that you wish to calibrate your monitors (and there is little point not doing so with the sort of money we are talking about) each will need its own graphics card – like young children, monitors do not share nicely with only one. We have twin ‘NVIDIA Quadro FX 570 – 128 MB’ units which cost about £200 each, so the outlay is not trivial.
It is impossible to give purchase advice on these matters, the graphics cards change on a monthly basis and we cannot keep up. Improvements are always highly targeted at the gaming industry. The PC Pro magazine A-lister at the moment is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 1.25GB at around £200 ex VAT. Guessing the nomenclature, the number looks like it might be a newer version of the FX 570 but is probably not; it is massively overspecified for Photoshop work! There are many cards at less than £100 that might well be adequate. Your second port of call after identifying a candidate graphics card is the Adobe website http://kb2.adobe.com/ cps/831/cpsid_83117.html which lists cards known to be compatible with Photoshop CS5 along with known issues (of which there are many!).
Currently they include, for example:
Nvidia GeForce
7000, 8000, 9000, 100, 200, 400 series
Nvidia Quadro FX
x500, x700, x800, FX370, FX380, FX580 series, Quadro CX cards
(The x represents the initial version number of the card. For example, x500
represents all card lines that end in 500, including the 4500, the 3500, and the 1500 series.)
Nvidia Quadro
600, 2000, 6000, 4000 (Mac).
The issues, some of which we have experienced, are crashes, jumpy brushes and general failure to keep up.
If you are going to use a high-end monitor such as the NEC Spectraview Reference 271 with its 2,560x1,440 pixel resolution then you might need a ‘dual link DVI’ cable. It looks the same as the standard one from the outside, but is vital for achieving performance. We tried the 721 on a standard version cable and the text and icons were unrecognisable at top resolution. The pin arrangements are different. Again you need advice from a competent geek before getting involved!
