Originally Posted by alex
Because the manufacturers seem to care less about accuracy and more about contrast ratio, refresh rates and bling. You must remember who drives the market. Gamers. If it wasn't for gamers we'd be lucky to be sitting behind Pentium IIs right now.Our CRTsalso have been taken over by plasmas and very large LCD TV screens. These components come out of the box jacked to the wall with contrast and over saturated color. In order for the LCD monitor manufactures to keep up they appear (at least in my experience) to do exactly the same thing. I got a Dell LCD with a Vostros system last fall to replace my wifes workstation that was way over the top with vibrant vivid color. But isn't that what gamers are looking for. If you think about it, everything they play is CG oriented so when a laser fires or a bomb explodes the vibrancy of the display greates a more powerful and imersive environment for the person involved.Alas, the color dosen't need to be accurate just bright and powerful.
It also seems to be getting worse as the monitors get larger. I just sold two small 17" dell LCD's that had awesome color reproduction. I never thought about profiling those. What you saw on the screen is what printed out on the HP inkjet. Were they 100% accurate? Probably not, but the reds didn't punch you in the eye and the greens didn't glow like a radioactive ooze. The colors looked normal. So, why the heck did I replace them. Because bigger is better. Higher resolution. More work space. 16:9 Aspect Ratio. Wider Gamut. Dang, forgot to ask about the color accuracy. But that's OK you can now spend another 300 USD on Color Munki or Spyder 3 just to find out that these new state of the art monitors will never give you perfect color accuracy no matter how manysleepless nights and support calls, and wasted weekends you spend trying to tweak it. And I forgot to mention the doulble profiling and the Adobe CS3 management settings and the bla bla bla.
Unless your willing to throw out the bucks for a NEC or Eizo or otherGraphic Art oriented Monitor your going to be stuck with the"gamers choice"that no color profiling software can corral. That's of-course IMHO!
The best you can do for 600 USD or less is to manually tweak until you can tolerate it.
So ends my rant..............whew!!
I'd still rather spend the money on a new lens,camera, or flash than on an Eizo. I don't know what I'm missing, which is very liberating.
So Alex, to answer your question: I haven't a clue dude, I'm just very frustrated with what I'm seeing these days. Your assumptions are closer to the reality of the matter than alot of folks would be willing to believe. I think in this case Mainstream = Gamers but with the proliferation of X-box, PSP, and Wii the PC gaming market is not the tech driving juggernaut it use to be. We may well see in the future a turning of priorities that could yield a slew of cost effective monitor(s) we're as photographers are looking for. Here's hope'n.
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