Best $230 ever spent on digital photography

[RbnDave]

Today, I finally bought a new monitor. I heard angels singing when I viewed my first picture. This thing is amazing! I got a 19 inch flat screen Viewsonic CRT. It only cost $229 at Best Buy. I can't believe they sell something this nice for so little money. There are probably even better deals if you don't mind searching around the net.

For years I was slogging away with my old Gateway 2000 15 incher. It worked fine and I never saw a need to replace it. Anyhow, I do a lot of travelling and I check my pbase account on a lot of different computers. On every computer, the pictures looked different. Most of the time, my pictures looked better on other people's computers. I could see I was making a bunch of editting mistakes because my monitor's colors and brightness was off.

I spent a month playing with calibration, but that didn't seem to help. Finally, I decided to just buy a new monitor.

I feel kind of stupid for not getting a better monitor sooner. This thing makes my pictures look great and it calibrated in a snap. Now, the colors I have on my monitor match what comes out of my printer. In the past, I would have to print a test photo and then make adjustments in photoshop to get the right print colors.

My recomendation for anyone with an old monitor --- BUY A NEW ONE! Best Buy is almost giving away their CRT monitors. If you are spending thousands of dollars on digital photography equipment don't waste all that potential by looking at your pictures through a junk monitor.

Dave

[Belmondo]

I also bought the Viewsonic 19" CRT at Best Buy, but for different reasons. For the last couple years, I've lusted for a flat panel display, and finally got a fairly decent one ---- Sony 18". In my exuberance, I gave away a perfectly good Gateway (Hitachi) 19” CRT monitor and a couple 17” Sony Trinitrons.

Soon thereafter, I noticed the color in all my prints was way off. Everything that looked great on the screen was looking washed-out and lifeless when printed. At first I blamed the printer, but eventually figured out that I was adjusting images based on the flat panel display which was way too bright and over-saturated. My compensation was killing the color in the prints.

After that revelation, I went back to Best Buy and bought a Viewsonic CRT plus a dual-output video card. I now have both monitors sitting on the desk. I use the CRT for image editing, and the flat panel for everything else. The extra real estate is useful too; I devote the CRT to the photo by itself, and use the flat panel for all the menus, palettes, etc..

By the way, my prints improved dramatically once I started doing my color correction on the CRT.

Tom