Outdoor Photographer - Inside A Big Lab Print

Check out the article "Inside A Big Lab Print" in the August 2007 issue of Outdoor Photographer to learn more about making large prints, with quotes from Rich Seiling...and check out our new Megapixel Print Size Chart for more detailed information on just how large you can print!

What does 93.8% of Adobe RGB Look Like?

What does 93.8% of Adobe RGB Look Like? We’re about to find out as we’ve just purchased a NEC MultiSync LCD2690WUXI for testing and evaluation.

Out of the box this is a stunning display...photographs look extraordinarily life like. With a 21.7 x 13.5 inch screen you see a 2:3 aspect ratio digital camera photograph at the same size as a 16x20 print, which in itself is pretty amazing. The color is brilliant....our initial take is that it is capable of showing more colors than we’re used to typically seeing on a display....but does that make it more accurate? We’ll let you know when we find out. Our definitive test is to use it day in and day out to make hundreds of prints, and then judge our experience to see if it is more accurate and easier to use.

To calibrate it we had to go to great lengths to tune down the brightness. In fact, the brightness control alone was not enough. Even with the brightness set at zero, our Gretag Eye-One Photo colorimeter was still registering 180 cd/m2, so we had to read the manual to learn about the “expert” on screen menu which gave us access to the “Low Bright Mode” which brings the overall brightness of the display down by 50%. With that adjustment made, we went back to the normal brightness control, which then had enough range to adjust our brightness to 120 cd/m2.

Another nice touch was the ability to adjust the annoyingly bright power LED on the front of the display. We switched ours to green and set it’s brightness at the lowest setting, because the last thing you want when doing critical color work is to be blinded by an LED that’s brighter than the sun.

We sure hope that this display is as accurate as the specs say, because it’s so wonderful to work with that it would be hard to give up!