A cheap, accurate LCD?

Happy New Year! I hope 2008 is a great year for your photography!

The offerings of color-accurate displays in the last few years have been changing a lot. We went from really good and cheap CRTs, to really good and EXPENSIVE LCDs. What the market has been lacking is a cheap, good LCD. Well, ViewSonic may have the answer in their new VP950b and VP2250wb.


According to the press release:

The VP950b offers 98% NTSC color and the VP2250wb offers 106% NTSC color capability. By comparison, the average LCD only offers 72% color. Thus, the color rendering of the VP950b and VP2250wb is far superior to the average LCD.

Now, this may not mean much, as the NTSC color space is not the best measure of a display for fine print making...but the fact that they reference it at all is a good sign. Most displays that are in the realm of 100% NTSC tend to do a good job in displaying larger colorspaces like AdobeRGB. But since they don’t specify AdobeRGB, it’s hard to directly compare it to other displays without buying one and looking at it with our eyeballs. Given that the 19-inch sells for $350 and the 22-inch for $450, it presents a significant savings over a 23" Apple Cinema Display or 19" NEC LCD1990SXi-BK...no small consideration for the recreational photographer on a budget. I’ll be adding these to my never-ending wish list of products I’d like to test, and share more when and if I have a report.