After reading several articles I purchased Dell Ultrasharp 2412M and then continued reading while I wait for it to arrive (tomorrow). I do this every time I purchase something and even though I've done my research and feel good about the purchase, I read some more and get all wigged out thinking I made a mistake.
Does anyone else use this monitor and have some positive thoughts about it?
I'm currently using a older Samsung Syncmaster 220wm that just does not match the color in LR or PS at all. My prints turn out fine and exactly like they look in ps/lr but displaying on my monitor sucks. Its worse when I use LR over Bridge into PS.
None of the Ultrasharp series of displays from Dell can be considered a bad monitor by any reasonable definition, and all should be a significant step up from your Samsung model, which uses a different panel technology that has a number of downsides, including worse viewing angles and more variation in brightness and colour rendition across the panel.
The U2412M is a relatively low-specced monitor in the Ultrasharp range however, so although it will be a big step up from your existing display, it does have some limitations in the photographic world that more expensive displays from Dell rectify.
The U2412M only covers 96% of the sRGB colourspace, which means that it can't quite display all of the colours that are supported by the colourspace most widely used on the web. This means that certain colours will appear slightly more desaturated on your screen than they actually are. However, 96% is a reasonable coverage for web work, and although 100% coverage is more desirable, it's certainly not a big problem. (Many budget displays only cover around 80% of the sRGB space, which does start to be very undesirable for photographic work).
It's also not what is known as a 'high-gamut' display. High-gamut displays (called 'PremierColour' in the Dell range) cover 100% of the sRGB space, and also cover 97-100% of the AdobeRGB space. AdobeRGB covers a much wider range of colours than can be displayed on a typical screen, and more accurately represents what a printer can produce. Wide gamut displays can be great if you are very familiar with colour management (I use one), but they also require careful setup or they can make things much worse, as without the correct settings on your monitor, computer, and editing software, you will incorrectly adjust your photos.
The U2412M also doesn't come factory-calibrated, unlike some Dell monitors. This means that it will not reproduce colours perfectly accurately out of the box. Higher-range Dell monitors come with a calibrated sRGB setting that not only covers 100% of the sRGB colour range, but also makes sure that, on average, colours are within two shades of where they should be. Pre-calibrated screens are very useful if you don't own a colour calibrator, but bear in mind that calibration, even pre-calibration, will become less effective as time passes and the display ages -- even with a pre-calibrated screen, it is recommended to calibrate the display on a regular basis if you care about colour accuracy.
Other monitors in the Dell range you could consider would be the U2414H, which again covers 96% of the sRGB colourspace, but comes pre-calibrated (you need to enable the sRGB profile in the settings to access this calibrated mode), or the U2413, which is a wide-gamut monitor covering 100% of the sRGB colourspace and 99% of the AdobeRGB colourspace, and comes with calibrated settings for both, but requires a very good understanding of colour management to not make things worse, rather than better.
I'd also add that, at least in Canada, Dell has a no-questions-asked returns policy for 30 days, including free return shipping, so if you don't like the monitor, you can always return it. However, I strongly suspect that you'll be very satisfied with the U2412M, as it's an excellent monitor for general photographic use.
I am a little confused by your final paragraph -- you say that the colours on your current monitor suck, that the prints turn out OK, but that the prints look like they do in Photoshop/Lightroom. I'm not sure I understand this -- if the colours are bad on your current monitor but the prints are good, then the prints should look different to how your photos look on the monitor? Maybe you can explain a bit further in this regard?
Wow, thank you for this post @abirkill Completely justifies my purchase and agrees with the other articles I read that led me to the purchase.
The colors on my desktop display do not match the image seen in LR/PS when editing.
Best example I can think of this morning is
One side is opened in ps and the other is a screenshot of my desktop.
This photo looks good on the web, great when I have it printed by a lab and dull when displayed on the desktop.
I calibrated the monitor with a Colormunki Smile and now my own printer prints correctly using that same profile, but the desktop itself remains looking this way. It was worse before calibration.
@nytewind OK, I hadn't realised that you had calibrated the screen. The problem that you are seeing there will not be fixed by your new monitor, but is partly a problem with calibration in general, and partly with the profile the Colormunki generated specifically.
In order for photos to look correct on a calibrated screen, every piece of software on the computer must support colour profiling. While all professional photo software does support colour profiling, most software not specifically designed for photographic use does not fully and correctly support colour profiling, including web browsers and certain Windows applications.
To make things more confusing, there are two types of profiles, an ICCv2 profile and an ICCv4 profile, with more applications supporting an ICCv2 profile than support an ICCv4 profile.
The issue you show there is very characteristic of your ColorMunki profiler having created and installed an ICCv4 profile. This is supported by Lightroom and Photoshop, but Windows Photo Viewer only supports ICCv2 profiles, so will not display photos correctly when you have an ICCv4 profile installed in Windows. This is not a problem with the monitor -- as Lightroom/PS shows, the monitor is quite capable of displaying the colours correctly when software uses the calibration profile you've created and installed.
Most calibration software has the option to create an ICCv2 profile instead, which will resolve this particular issue, but will still cause some inconsistencies in other applications that are even less profile-aware. For example, no web browser currently correctly support monitor colour profiles correctly out of the box -- Firefox can be forced to do so by tweaking some hidden options, the rest do various things incorrectly regardless, to greater or lesser extents.
The first thing to do when you get your new monitor is to remove the calibration profile you have installed, otherwise the colours on the new monitor will be completely wrong (as the calibration profile is specific to your Samsung). You can do this in the Color Management section of Control Panel. This (after a reboot) should mean that photos start to look the same between Lightroom and Windows (unless you have a misconfiguration somewhere -- if they don't, stop there as we need to fix that!).
You will then need to decide if the Dell is close enough to accurate to not bother calibrating, or if you want to calibrate that too. Bear in mind that if you can't get the Colormunki to generate an ICCv2 profile, you will go back to seeing differences between LR/PS and Windows, although as the Dell should be closer to accurate out of the box, the differences will probably be smaller.
This stuff is very complicated, so if any of that doesn't make sense, or if you have questions, please ask :)
@abirkill That does make sense and explains why it was still off after calibration.
The reason I calibrated to begin with was because of how horrible it looked displayed on the desktop. Calibration did improve it but not enough for my liking. I was also noting on some site (smugmug) some images did not display the same as I was seeing in PS/LR
The Dell U2412M arrived today and it is amazing. I did remove the Samsung profiles before I installed the new montior and while the color was amazing overall but a bit cool I did calibrate just to be on the safe side and have my printer print close to what I see (It didn't without the smile profile with the samsung) so I did calibrate and it warmed up my images to what they should be.
Thank you for taking time to explain the profiles for me and how they work. I greatly appreciate it.
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The U2412M is a relatively low-specced monitor in the Ultrasharp range however, so although it will be a big step up from your existing display, it does have some limitations in the photographic world that more expensive displays from Dell rectify.
The U2412M only covers 96% of the sRGB colourspace, which means that it can't quite display all of the colours that are supported by the colourspace most widely used on the web. This means that certain colours will appear slightly more desaturated on your screen than they actually are. However, 96% is a reasonable coverage for web work, and although 100% coverage is more desirable, it's certainly not a big problem. (Many budget displays only cover around 80% of the sRGB space, which does start to be very undesirable for photographic work).
It's also not what is known as a 'high-gamut' display. High-gamut displays (called 'PremierColour' in the Dell range) cover 100% of the sRGB space, and also cover 97-100% of the AdobeRGB space. AdobeRGB covers a much wider range of colours than can be displayed on a typical screen, and more accurately represents what a printer can produce. Wide gamut displays can be great if you are very familiar with colour management (I use one), but they also require careful setup or they can make things much worse, as without the correct settings on your monitor, computer, and editing software, you will incorrectly adjust your photos.
The U2412M also doesn't come factory-calibrated, unlike some Dell monitors. This means that it will not reproduce colours perfectly accurately out of the box. Higher-range Dell monitors come with a calibrated sRGB setting that not only covers 100% of the sRGB colour range, but also makes sure that, on average, colours are within two shades of where they should be. Pre-calibrated screens are very useful if you don't own a colour calibrator, but bear in mind that calibration, even pre-calibration, will become less effective as time passes and the display ages -- even with a pre-calibrated screen, it is recommended to calibrate the display on a regular basis if you care about colour accuracy.
Other monitors in the Dell range you could consider would be the U2414H, which again covers 96% of the sRGB colourspace, but comes pre-calibrated (you need to enable the sRGB profile in the settings to access this calibrated mode), or the U2413, which is a wide-gamut monitor covering 100% of the sRGB colourspace and 99% of the AdobeRGB colourspace, and comes with calibrated settings for both, but requires a very good understanding of colour management to not make things worse, rather than better.
I'd also add that, at least in Canada, Dell has a no-questions-asked returns policy for 30 days, including free return shipping, so if you don't like the monitor, you can always return it. However, I strongly suspect that you'll be very satisfied with the U2412M, as it's an excellent monitor for general photographic use.
I am a little confused by your final paragraph -- you say that the colours on your current monitor suck, that the prints turn out OK, but that the prints look like they do in Photoshop/Lightroom. I'm not sure I understand this -- if the colours are bad on your current monitor but the prints are good, then the prints should look different to how your photos look on the monitor? Maybe you can explain a bit further in this regard?
The colors on my desktop display do not match the image seen in LR/PS when editing.
Best example I can think of this morning is
One side is opened in ps and the other is a screenshot of my desktop.
This photo looks good on the web, great when I have it printed by a lab and dull when displayed on the desktop.
I calibrated the monitor with a Colormunki Smile and now my own printer prints correctly using that same profile, but the desktop itself remains looking this way. It was worse before calibration.
In order for photos to look correct on a calibrated screen, every piece of software on the computer must support colour profiling. While all professional photo software does support colour profiling, most software not specifically designed for photographic use does not fully and correctly support colour profiling, including web browsers and certain Windows applications.
To make things more confusing, there are two types of profiles, an ICCv2 profile and an ICCv4 profile, with more applications supporting an ICCv2 profile than support an ICCv4 profile.
The issue you show there is very characteristic of your ColorMunki profiler having created and installed an ICCv4 profile. This is supported by Lightroom and Photoshop, but Windows Photo Viewer only supports ICCv2 profiles, so will not display photos correctly when you have an ICCv4 profile installed in Windows. This is not a problem with the monitor -- as Lightroom/PS shows, the monitor is quite capable of displaying the colours correctly when software uses the calibration profile you've created and installed.
Most calibration software has the option to create an ICCv2 profile instead, which will resolve this particular issue, but will still cause some inconsistencies in other applications that are even less profile-aware. For example, no web browser currently correctly support monitor colour profiles correctly out of the box -- Firefox can be forced to do so by tweaking some hidden options, the rest do various things incorrectly regardless, to greater or lesser extents.
The first thing to do when you get your new monitor is to remove the calibration profile you have installed, otherwise the colours on the new monitor will be completely wrong (as the calibration profile is specific to your Samsung). You can do this in the Color Management section of Control Panel. This (after a reboot) should mean that photos start to look the same between Lightroom and Windows (unless you have a misconfiguration somewhere -- if they don't, stop there as we need to fix that!).
You will then need to decide if the Dell is close enough to accurate to not bother calibrating, or if you want to calibrate that too. Bear in mind that if you can't get the Colormunki to generate an ICCv2 profile, you will go back to seeing differences between LR/PS and Windows, although as the Dell should be closer to accurate out of the box, the differences will probably be smaller.
This stuff is very complicated, so if any of that doesn't make sense, or if you have questions, please ask :)
The reason I calibrated to begin with was because of how horrible it looked displayed on the desktop. Calibration did improve it but not enough for my liking. I was also noting on some site (smugmug) some images did not display the same as I was seeing in PS/LR
The Dell U2412M arrived today and it is amazing. I did remove the Samsung profiles before I installed the new montior and while the color was amazing overall but a bit cool I did calibrate just to be on the safe side and have my printer print close to what I see (It didn't without the smile profile with the samsung) so I did calibrate and it warmed up my images to what they should be.
Thank you for taking time to explain the profiles for me and how they work. I greatly appreciate it.