Monitors and "Ultra" 4k TVs - two many circles in my head

[Kayaker72]

I have very little to contribute, but this is one of those threads I am watching with great interest. Look forward to hearing what you figure out.

[DavidEccleston]

A monitor with lookup? Is that if you aren't using it on a computer, and can't apply an ICC profile at the graphics driver level, so you're transforming the color on the monitor itself? At first that seems weird, but I guess if you connect the monitor to your camera directly then that's your only option for color calibration.

[Busted Knuckles]

A monitor with lookup? Is that if you aren't using it on a computer, and can't apply an ICC profile at the graphics driver level, so you're transforming the color on the monitor itself? At first that seems weird, but I guess if you connect the monitor to your camera directly then that's your only option for color calibration.

Well that is what is in the product description, distracting advertising copy? Perhaps when running a video/streaming somthing??? I have to admit, this one of the parts of imaging I know very little about (as if I know anything about any part of imaging).

While I have done some uber big pano's w/ the idea of doing a wall sized high res print, I haven't yet done so - mostly because I haven't figured out a good way to cost effectively change the wall size prints (advent of modern life - wanting to be constantly over stimulated?). My point to this is that it is far more likely that all my images are going to be seen by some computer screen or HD TV somewhere and 10bit RGB 4k is pretty much the top of things for images flinging about the internet for the next 2 or 3 weeks (and the masses for a much longer time).

I have heard/read look up tables the past (don't recall precisely how they were used, etc) I think this is a bit of my one simple anxiety of not doing anything any less intelligent than I already have (which actually would be pretty hard to do as I have done some really lesser things).

I am wanting to dial up the enjoy images more than acquire gear to acquire more images that I don't see very often. Kayaker and I chatted about traveling to take more images vs. acquiring gear - this is along the same lines.

Thanks for reading the ramble any help on this is appreciated.

Specific language below

"This Brand X monitor delivers stunning definition for color-critical applications and is designed for Content Developers, Graphics Professionals & Post Production. With 3840x2160 resolution, and SuperClear IPS technology for wide-angle viewing, this 10-bit monitor can display up to 1.07 billion colors, while a 14-bit 3D look-up table and pre-calibrated Delta E≤2 provides a color palette of up to 4.39 trillion colors. It also features split screen capabilities for up to four screens."

[DavidEccleston]

Ok... So I've read up on what a 3D LUT will give you... it's more for color grading and transformation than calibration, and I fail to see how this isn't something any modern GPU can do in it's sleep, like a small compute shader run over the image before outputting it. So, again, perhaps it's meant for a feed coming straight from a fancy Cine camera, and in this case you've preloaded some moody "post-effect" onto the monitor so you can see a decent preview of how the color and lighting will look, before you go through the whole post-processing step and figure out you need to reshoot the scene (note, that's expensive!). Perhaps if that's your life, this feature is useful, and money saving. For a typical photographer, it's near useless.

Apparently Photoshop has supported 30-bit (10-bit x 3 channels) in Windows since 2012, however it's new to OS X (since El Capitan), and Photoshop added support as recently as December. It's support depends on the machine, obviously, and the only example they give is that the 5K iMac supports it.

IPS is good. A cheap $100-$200 monitors are based on something called "TN", or twisted nematic. They're good for office use, gaming, etc, but not art, photography, etc. The colors are typically poor, and change depending on viewing angle. On my old cheap Dell monitors some colors would shift considerably at low angles, and at extreme vertical angles the colors would actually invert. On my iMac's IPS display, at extreme angles, the brightness dims, but the colors remain true. You can test your monitor here, with nothing more than your browser and your eyes. The link should take you directly to the viewing angle test. View the image from above, below, left and right. Scroll down to the different colors, and see how they all respond... some colors may be affected less than others.

So, in summary, you want IPS. I'm not sure you need 10-bit per channel. A wider gamut may be good too, but be warned people viewing your images may not see something as nice as you do.

This guide seems to cover all this: http://www.144hzmonitors.com/photo-e...-january-2016/ ... the one they recommend for 4K... perhaps the one you were looking at, as it has the 14-bit 3D LUT, is the 32" NEC Multisync PA322UHD.

[Busted Knuckles]

Thanks David, this is alot of help. The one in question is the viewsonic - I will check out the NEC.

[Busted Knuckles]

Performance update - Awesome.

While that start up from a cold start is much faster (thanks to the SSD drive) the real tell of the tape is the stitching of the mega pano. You might recall I did a 200+ frame pano of the east side of Logan's pass (take w/ a 5dSr). Well on my month old i7 laptop 12 g ram, 4g dedicated to the graphics card, it took 10 ish minutes to load the images, and a casual cup off coffee to align, and then a leisurely lunch to render the 65k x 30k (1.96 gigapixel) image. Well the new box did these tasks in the following time frames - a little under a minute to load all the images (229 of them), and just about 30 seconds to align and then perhaps a full minute to render.

So I am pretty happy with the oomph that this system has. I have yet to optimize the RAM drive(probably won't at this point), etc, etc. this is pretty much straight out of the box.

With gigapixel results a few a minute or two away vs. hours, I a getting stoked to go do some more of this type of work. I am still working on the real graphics monitor. The only draw back now is that it makes the uber images of a 5DsR and one of the uber sharp tele's more available from a through put perspective may trigger a relapse of GAS. No new cool thing is ever the end - it is always a new beginning

[jrw]

NEC does carry a hefty price premium for the improvement over other products. For those who are more budget conscious but still want a great display I think that ASUS PA327Q(4k sRGB) or PA279Q(WQHD AdobeRGB) are good options to consider for a fraction of the cost. Would suggest the PA279Q to have the gamut range for editing and softproofing before making prints. many printers can go beyond the sRGB colour space now.

Kind of curious about some specs on your new beast of a computer.

[Busted Knuckles]

I-7 6700 @ 4 ghz, 64 g DDR4, 980ti 6gb graphics card, SSD 256g for software, and a T2 mechanical w/ 6 gbit transfer rate.

I found a reference to PA329Q that was a step up from the 328 connection wise - announced but not released yet.

[jrw]

That does sound like a monster for crunching through big panos. One possible item to watch for that did catch me by surprise once was the size of temp files getting big enough to prevent saving the files onto a drive that has less than 200GB free space on it. Couldn't clean out the temp files as they were in use and couldn't save the work due to lack of disk space. I installed an extra SSD that I had for use as a scratch disk and it solved issues from the temp files. Not something that too many people are going to find out about until they work with really big files.

[Busted Knuckles]

Great catch, I will check the temp file sizes. I can see a larger SSD (or additional one) could be the next step up in performance. I plan to be setting up a mirrored set of hard drives in a couple of months.