Pixiq

While revising and updating my e-book Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: A Professional Photographer's Workflow for Lightroom 3, it became apparent that my color management wasn’t as good as it could be and that my old monitor was part of the problem. My old monitor was an Apple Cinema Display, which by all accounts is a well respected monitor. That is also the monitor that a large percentage of pro photographers use on a day to day basis. But the reality is that the Apple Cinema Displays are not that great when it comes to color accuracy for critical color work. By comparison, the Eizo ColorEdge monitors are revered for their incredible color accuracy and also for their ability to show almost all of the Adobe RGB color space, which is the main color space of the working professional photographer. 

Ever since the digital revolution began all photographers have struggled to have their work printed just as it appears on their monitors. Obviously there is a lot more that goes into getting accurate colors in a print than just the monitor but this is the hub of everything we do with our images and as such it is one of the key components that needs to be chosen with very careful thought. 

Before we get into the technical details of the monitor I want to give you a bit of the back story for all of this so you know why I chose the Eizo ColorEdge CG243W instead of something else. I was a guest blogger for Will Crockett’s ShootSmarter.com website for a number of years. I wrote about Lightroom, digital workflow and a variety of other topics for that blog. While writing for him and getting to know him and his work it became clear that he had done some serious testing on every aspect of color management including monitors and monitor calibration. He was very critical of most monitors and recommended only a handful of high end monitors for photographers. He was the one who recommended the Eizo ColorEdge CG243W to me. Along with his recommendation and that of a few other top retouchers and photographers, it became clear that this monitor would be one of the best available anywhere and would radically improve my color management.

I know many of you are thinking that you have been getting along just fine with your current monitor and don’t see the need to spend $2,000+ on one of the Eizo options. I understand. It was hard for me to spend so much money on an Eizo. I didn’t want to spend $2,300 for the CG243W, but accurate color is critical for my work. And I want to know 100% that when an image leaves my office it is completely dialed in and should print with accurate color if the pre-press printer knows what they are doing. That is why I bought the Eizo. It shows approximately 98% of the Adobe RGB color space. It has consistent color from edge to edge and shows black and white images with incredible accuracy and with no color cast. It is only a 24-inch diagonal monitor, which might seem small these days but the 30-inch Eizo option is $5,000 so you’ll understand why I went with the 24-inch. I find the 24-inch to be plenty big. The monitor comes with a hood, monitor calibration software, 10-bit color built in and a whole host of other features not available on other monitors. As they say, you get what you pay for.

First off, if you are working on a normal monitor and process your images in the Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB color space then you are not seeing all of the colors in your images. I can attest to this. I am now seeing colors in my images I have never seen before. And because I can now see those colors I can control them for the best output. As in the color chart below it is easy to see the portion of the visible spectrum that sRGB covers and the larger Adobe RGB color space. The ISO Coated color space is the CMYK color space used by the average magazine to print on pre-presses. As you can see the Adobe RGB color space fully contain this color space as well. There are only a handful of monitors on the market that even claim to show most or all of the Adobe RGB color space. Eizo and LaCie are the only two manufacturers that I know of that lay claim to showing a significant portion of the Adobe RGB color space. 

For the pro photographer working for editorial and commercial clients I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a monitor that shows the entire working color space for accurate color. There are many other factors that make the Eizos incredible monitors. I’ll let you explore the tech details on your own. As a side note be aware that these monitors can make colors on the web look quite “neon” when in the Adobe RGB mode. This is easily averted by using the sRGB emulation mode when looking at the web. When I first calibrated my monitor and looked at my website I was horrified until I figured this out. 

If you are in the market for a new monitor I would highly recommend checking out Will Crockett’s monitor recommendations. There are a few other monitor’s that show most of the Adobe RGB color space (but are not as color accurate as the Eizo here) like the LaCie 324 and 526 and there is also a smaller version of the CG243W, the Eizo CG223W, which is a 22-inch version of the CG243W and only costs $1,350. Whatever monitor you choose make sure that it can be calibrated and profiled accurately. If you need incredible color accuracy and the best money can buy I highly recommend the Eizo ColorEdge monitors.