LCD Displays Come of Age

By David Em

May 17, 2004

(LCD Displays Come of Age :  Page 1 of 1 )

For most folks, buying an LCD display instead of a CRT tube is a no-brainer. LCDs are thin and light, and now that prices have plummeted on 15 inch and 17 inch models, they're cost-effective as well. Compared to CRTs, LCDs display much brighter pictures and sharper text, even if you use an analog input instead of a digital DVI connector. But for imaging pros who work with high-end color and moving pictures, the choice isn't so simple.

For the last month I've been testing HP's $999 L2035 20 inch LCD. It's one of the first displays that's got the right combination of color quality, speed, resolution, and price/performance to make it a contender in the professional work space.

Color

LCDs have historically had two major deficiencies. The first is color fidelity. Most LCDs cannot reproduce portions of the already truncated sRGB color space used by virtually all computer displays, particularly certain parts of the blue-green and violet-purple ranges. A related problem is that LCD colors shift, sometimes radically, when you look at the screen from any angle other than head-on. If color precision matters to you, these are nontrivial issues.

Viewability is not a significant concern with the L2035. I spent quite a few hours color correcting digital photographs in Photoshop in front of it, and experienced no difficulty. I set it up in a dual monitor environment next to our standard reference monitor, an Eizo F980 tube, and was impressed by the difference. The F980 has served us well, but compared to the L2035's brightness and sharpness, it appeared positively blurry. There are LCDs on the market that have higher brightness specs, but that much light intensity is actually overkill—I kept the L2035's brightness level set to 90 percent.

The L2035 delivers a brilliant page white and very deep blacks. Color accuracy is likewise very good, and there's very little color distortion when viewed from an angle. In addition to the F980, I compared the L2035's output to several of our other high-quality tubes, and in every case, I found the L2035's rendition of photographs, computer images, and text documents to be more accurate.

 Page 1 of 1