NEC and LaCie Lead On Professional LCD Gear

Professional LCD Displays: The Important Features

For professionals, there's no point even mentioning 1280x1024 resolution; it's just not enough. So immediately that means that 17" and 19" LCD monitors go out the window. For CAD, high resolution allows detailed viewing, both photo and video, providing the sharpness necessary to assess the intricacies of the image. In my opinion, 1600x1200 is the minimum when talking about a professional standard display. At that resolution the diagonal size of the screen explodes - as does the price - so you'll find nothing smaller than 20.1" in this review.

Now we have diverging interests to discuss. A CAD pro will want perfect color reproduction, with limited garish color "flatness", whereas a photography enthusiast would prefer that the "warmth" or saturation of the colors be preserved. Actually, Protel CAD (used for designing printed circuit boards) and Cadence Virtuoso IC (for the design of integrated circuits on silicon) only use a few colors for the different types of trace lines. Until recently, Cadence Virtuoso IC even used only 8 bit pseudo-color. It's more important to differentiate between different traces at a quick glance and, so, saturated colors are best at supporting this rapid distinction. Ditto for CAM with AutoCad, for example - flashy colors on a black background provide good contrast for the user during work.

On the other hand, photo editing needs a high-fidelity color screen that shows images as much as possible as they would look on paper: in short, true color reproduction more than anything else. The screen dynamics are equally important. We've said before that contrast, as defined in the standard, has more than a little to do with the dynamics of a monitor. Good dynamics will allow details to appear on the screen that would be hidden on the majority of standard LCD monitors.

We should also say that we're only interested in monitors that are practical for a full working day. Their users often spend more than 8 hours in front of them, so they must be impeccably ergonomic. The same goes for brightness; to avoid eyestrain, a display mustn't be too bright.

Viewing angles are also a feature worthy of discussion. A wide viewing angle allows the screen's contents to be shared with co-workers, but on the other hand, some people prefer a narrow viewing angle for the very reason of others not being able to see what's on the screen! It's not a good idea for visitors to the office, for example, to realize that you're working on a project for their main rival. Some of the panels tested came with sun-visors to fit on the sides of the screen, to improve privacy and avoid annoying reflections from the surroundings. Obviously, wide viewing angles are pretty unimportant in this type of a working environment.

Of course, we've yet to mention latency. The importance of this all depends on your application: if you work in video editing, then obviously you'll need to have very low latency, but, in the range of screen sizes we're looking at, few of the screens offer satisfactory response times. Fortunately, for most other applications, latency doesn't matter much.