Software & Computers

When it comes to choosing a display for your computer to do photographic image editing and color correction there is an old saying, “You can’t control what you can’t see.” This should be your primary guide as to what to buy. ViewSonic has been a brand name associated with monitors and displays from the earliest days of personal computers and the company recently announced new, professional models. The leading specification for the ViewSonic VP2250wb 22” widescreen LCD is a larger color gamut that is 106 percent of the NTSC standard. What is NTSC you might ask? Well, it is a standard established for television video color space in 1953 that is similar in size to Adobe RGB, and is much larger than sRGB. It has a stronger red and a slightly weaker blue and green. The bottom line is that this new ViewSonic model has a significantly larger color gamut than typical consumer home/office LCD computer displays and better supports the Adobe Photoshop standard and requirement for editing digital photography.

This new ViewSonic 22” LCD display features the performance digital photographers need at an affordable $449 estimated street price.

Some of the other ViewSonic features crucial to digital photographic image work involve the adjustment controls necessary to be able to calibrate and profile the display. These include both a brightness and contrast control, as well as a color temperature setting. In addition, the 22” designated size of this new ViewSonic model has a viewing area that is 18.3” wide by 11.4” high with a diagonal measurement of 21.6”. This screen size has a native resolution of 1680x1050 pixels. A very high motion response time of 2ms is quite favorable to video display playback. The display features both analog input with a 15-pin D-sub as well as the now standard DVI digital input connector. And there is a built-in USB hub with an input and four output connectors. The ViewSonic VP2250wb can be used with both Windows PCs and Apple Mac computers. The good news for the budget conscious is the estimated selling price given by ViewSonic for the VP2250wb, $449.

Set Up And Calibration
My first action was to connect and use a ColorVision Spyder2PRO to calibrate and profile the display. Everything about this LCD display is consistent with industry standards, including the on-screen adjustment controls, consisting of five buttons at the center of the bottom bezel framing the display. After 20 minutes or so I had the VP2250wb adjusted to my parameters of 0.50 cd/m2 for the black point and 120.0 cd/m2 for the white point, and set at 6500° Kelvin color temperature and a gamma of 2.2. This became my custom profile as the system default for the display. The result was a very neutral gray and good color brilliance, with quite sharp detail and clear, contrasty text fonts in documents and application control windows. For anyone installing this LCD display after using even a large CRT, the 1680x1050 pixel resolution does make standard 10/12-point typefaces quite small in appearance. Don’t lower the display resolution setting to get the type larger as LCDs do not perform nearly as well at any resolution other than their native setting.

Compared to sRGB’s small gamut, shown filled in inside the Adobe RGB gamut that’s about 30 percent larger, the gamut of the VP2250wb is only slightly less in blue and green and larger in red compared to Adobe RGB. This is based on the profile gamut size displayed by CHROMiX’s ColorThink profile measurement and analysis software.