Do you find wide gamut displays that can display the entire Adobe RGB gamut useful for fine art printing?

Most of us have our source images and Photoshop working space in wide gamut colorspaces such as ProPhoto or Adobe RGB and we try to get the widest possible gamut from our fine art printers. Yet most displays, even some highly regarded IPS panel models are sRGB. I'm wondering if anyone who is using one of the recent Adobe RGB monitors has found it to make a useful improvement in their post processing workflow. I'm looking to upgrade from a CRT monitor and I'm intrigued by the new and relatively affordable wide gamut IPS panel monitors from Dell and HP but I'm put off by the QA and uniformity problems reported. The better and more expensive IPS panel models (such as from NEC and Apple) however are not wide gamut if I'm not mistaken.

There are wide gamut models in the catalogues of NEC, Eizo, Samsung.

http://www.digitalversus.com/duels.php?ty=...2=4014&ph=1

An sRGB monitor is a CM bottleneck in the workflow today.



met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst Dinkla

Try: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/

If your goal is processing your images for print on a good printer you will benefit from a wide gamut display. I print on the HPZ3100 and use the NEC 3090. I edit in the Prophoto color space and view my prints in a D50 viewing station. It is a pleasure to be able to trust that what I see on this great monitor
is an accurate representation of what comes out of the printer.

On the other hand, I have not found a way to prevent my 8-bit sRGB Jpegs from appearing over-saturated when not in a Photoshop environment, and have to double check them on my wife's CRT system. But it is a small price to pay for the great results I get in my main workflow.

I use the HP LP2480zx DreamColor monitor. This monitor offers the widest color gamut currently available and the ability to switch from any of it's seven calibrated color spaces with the push of a button. So when you want to work on those sRGB images you just select the sRGB color space.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF...71-3648397.html

Jerry- elaborate a bit on your display. All the discussions seem to revolve around the NEC's and Eizo's.

Wider is “better” when the data in the document falls outside the gamut of the display and of course, you wish to view such colors.
Wider is “worse” when the data in the document doesn’t fall outside the gamut of the display because very subtle colors have a colorimetrically wider distance on a wide gamut device than a narrower gamut device.

IF you plot the gamut of the image (something you can do in ColorThink) on top of the gamut of the display, on top of the gamut of the output device, you see widely differing shapes and a mismatch in some areas of color space. Ultimately, there are colors you capture device, display and output device can’t all fully render.

>> Wider is “worse” when the data in the document doesn’t fall outside the gamut of the display because very subtle colors have a colorimetrically wider distance on a wide gamut device than a narrower gamut device.

Is the issue causing this beyond the capabilities of a good monitor profile and a good color management aware application? When you say subtle colors, are you talking about differences too fine grained for a profile conversion process to handle accurately? Or are there hardware limitations regarding color display technology?

Think of sRGB as a half inflated balloon with 16.7 million dots. Think of Adobe RGB as the same 16.7 million dots but the balloon is twice as big now. The colorimetric distance between the dots is wider now. The deltaE between R12/B23/G67 and R13/B23/G67 is greater in Adobe RGB (1998) versus sRGB. At such a time that the full path, from application, OS, driver etc is more than 8-bits, that’s not going to change. Its not a deal stopper. But if you routinely work with subtle colors (think bride in white wedding dress), a wider gamut display isn’t showing you the same subtleties as a narrower gamut display.

I see. Thanks for the explanation. So the continuous tonality in a wide gamut display will be coarser due to bigger jumps from one RGB control signal to the closest next one. The color resolution is smaller although the color range is larger. Can this in practice lead to more banding/posterization in smooth tonal transitions such as sunset colors in the sky, which perhaps will not show up in the printer output?

It would not affect per say the output, only what you see on-screen. That said, the larger the color gamut of the working space, the more you want to be working with high bit files for exactly the same reasons.

This thread includes downloadable documents describing the function and theory behind the Dreamcolor monitor:

http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....=38138&st=0

Andrew makes a good point, which is discussed in another recent thread. If one had a 10 bit or more per channel pipeline from Photoshop to the graphics display, this problem would largely go away. I don't know if Karl Lang has a PhD as mentioned in the referenced thread, but he is a recognized expert in this area and I think he is Andrew's technical editor.

The possibility of 10 bit color in Windows 7 and Photoshop is discussed in a thread on the Adobe Photoshop forum. I don't know what is going on with the Mac.

When the monitor has the capability of displaying 100% of Adobe RGB in one calibrated profile and 100% of sRGB in a separate calibrated profile stored in the monitor's LUT, there is no problem mapping or displaying accurate color.