Tips on working with a large gamut display

[paulr]

Thanks to the miracle of craigslist, I finally retired my trusty LaCie CRT monitor and brought home an NEC multisync.

But after I got home I realized it was a different model from the one I expected ... it's the LCD2690wuxi2, which is a wide gamut model. I thought I was getting the 24" version which is sRGB.

I've read a bunch on the subject, including this (http://www.gballard.net/photoshop/srgb_wide_gamut.html) article, which suggest that wide gamut displays are hard to work with whenever you're dealing with untagged color (like most aps, and most of the web) because Colrsync on the mac maps all colors to the monitor's profile. This leads to blown out, ultra-saturated cartoon colors on untagged images.

I can confirm that this is true, but then I tried using Spectraview (NEC's proprietary color management software, which actually talks to the monitor hardware and adjusts the lookup tables) to calibrate to the sRGB color space. It seemed to work fine.

Now, through spectraview, I can switch between Adobe RGB and sRGB color spaces in one click.

This seems like an ideal solution, but I haven't heard anyone talk about it. Are there drawbacks that anyone can think of? I'd be worried about reduced dynamic range and all that, but these adjustments are done in hardware, where the internal resolution is 12 bits. None of it goes through the video card, as far as I know.

Thanks for any thoughts!

[Preston]

Paul,

I use SpectraView with my P221W. When I received my new computer back in May, and before I calibrated, I made sure my video driver was set to default values, i.e. no color management was applied by the video card.

When I calibrated using SpectraView I created my own target values and ran the software using the NEC-Branded EyeOne colorimeter. I have had consistent results and excellent color tracking.

Here is a nice primer for calibrating an NEC monitor using SpectraView: http://www.imagescience.com.au/kb/questions/142/How+To+Calibrate+An+NEC+Monitor+With+SpectraView+II. I found it to be very handy.

--P

[paulr]

I understand how to calibrate the monitor; my question is about the possibility of avoiding the problems inherent in wide-gamut displays by creating an sRGB calibration for non-photo use.