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by Charlie Woodrich on Thu Feb 27, 2014 6:05 pm
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I'm looking to upgrade my monitor, and I'm looking at the NEC models.  Some come with Spectreview (SV), and some don't.  In most cases it appears that you pay a premium for the monitor that comes equipped with SV.  I currently use Color Eyes Display Pro with a Spyder 3 puck. If money made no difference, but you don't want to be wasteful, would you pay the premium for SV, or would you use the Color Eyes Display setup ?
 

by E.J. Peiker on Thu Feb 27, 2014 6:54 pm
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There are a number of benefits to the Specrtravue over what youa re using with NEC monitors. the main one is that it writes the correction tables to the monitor itself rather than using a software interpretation layer. The other is that it is 10 bits per color rather than 8 bits per color. I had the same decision to make as you and chose the Spectravue and am very happy that I did. I regularly get dE values of less than 0.20.
 

by jsavage21 on Thu Feb 27, 2014 7:46 pm
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What E.J. said. The SpectraView software is far superior than using 3rd party, even Color Eyes. Also the folks at NEC are the best to work with when it comes to technical questions regarding calibration and their software.
 

by mikeojohnson on Thu Feb 27, 2014 8:44 pm
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I bought a pair of them for my new Mac Pro.  I like the color profiling.  Just plug in the device and start it up.  The two monitors appear identical, which is different than my old mac monitors.  The only problem I am having is waking them up when the MacPro goes to sleep and wakes up.  They stay in the sleep mode for awhile and then turn off.  I haven't researched this but would guess there must be a setting somewhere that I missed.  Even with this annoyance I am very happy with the monitors.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention:  I got some of the first ones available from B&H.  They came with owners manuals that looked like they were in Russian.  I had to find the english manuals on line.
Mike
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http://www.mojphoto.com
 

by Royce Howland on Thu Feb 27, 2014 8:53 pm
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A couple of points of clarification. The primary difference between, for example, a NEC PA272W-BK and a PA272W-BK-SV, is that the SpectraView version comes with NEC's own calibration software and a NEC-labelled version of the X-Rite i1 Display Pro colorimeter. The monitor is identical in both cases. (Although it is said that the SpectraView monitors are specially factory tested & selected for much tighter tolerances, they roll off the same assembly line as the non-SpectraView versions of the model.)

The issue is that third-party calibration software like ColorEyes, i1 Match, i1 Profiler, Spyder, etc. can't drive the proprietary hardware within the monitor; only NEC's own calibration software can do that. And a third-party hardware device (colorimeter) may not be optimal at reading the full range of colours the monitor can produce. While NEC uses the X-Rite i1 Display Pro device, they custom tune it to fit their wide gamut displays. You can buy the NEC monitor by itself and run a third-party calibration on it, but you're foregoing the benefits of the extra monitor hardware.

One big benefit of the proprietary monitor hardware is the built-in 14-bit lookup table (LUT). If you don't use it, your third-party calibration tool will write information into your video card's 8-bit LUT. What this means is that when the calibration step is going through setting things like the black point, white point and colour temperature, the adjustment curves (or tables) that are created will only have 8 bits to work with in the video card. This will result in loss of contrast and loss of tonal resolution; instead of having 255 levels each of Red, Green and Blue, you'll have somewhat less levels of each, for combined loss of some colours and B&W tones. Using NEC's own calibration tool to drive the 14-bit LUT inside the monitor, there is no pragmatic loss of colour, tones or contrast... you'll get pretty much everything the monitor is capable of delivering. That's because the monitor's correction curves are made using a much higher bit depth than what the video card would be capable of doing, and correct the display in-monitor after the video card has delivered the image. The analogy is similar to using Photoshop Curves adjustments on an 8-bit file, vs. doing the edits on a 16-bit file.

E.J's reference to 8-bit vs. 10-bit is a whole other can of worms, not related to any of the preceding. All NEC PA272W-BK monitors, for example, are 10-bit monitors. This is true for both SpectraView and non-SpectraView. This means they're capable of 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 1,073,741,824 separate colours without dithering (or 1024 discrete B&W tones), rather than 255 * 255 * 255 = 16,581,375 colours (or 255 B&W tones) that 8-bit monitors can produce. (Or 64 * 64 * 64 = 262,144 separate colours if you're unlucky enough to have a really cheap 6-bit monitor.)

But in order to take advantage of 10-bit display, you need a 10-bit capable video card (many / most aren't), a 10-bit display connection (usually DisplayPort), applications that support 10-bit display output (Photoshop does, Lightroom and most others don't)... and a lot of magic because the whole 10-bit display thing is very flakey and troublesome. (10-bit display seems to be failing on a lot of Photoshop CC installations, for example.) You can use a 10-bit monitor on a garden variety 8-bit video card just fine; it will simply give you 8 bits of colour instead of 10. None of this has anything to do with SpectraView, or the NEC-branded calibration system.

My recommendation to folks is, if you're going to spring the coin for a high-end monitor like a NEC or Eizo, then go ahead and get it with the manufacturer's own calibration system. This will give you the full capabilities of the display. Conversely if you're bound & determined not to buy the manufacturer's calibration system, then perhaps you're over-spending for the monitor and should just settle for a mid-range LED IPS monitor from somebody like Dell.
Royce Howland
 

by E.J. Peiker on Thu Feb 27, 2014 11:05 pm
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Sorry for confusing the 10 bit issue, just 2.5 hours of sleep last night due to some family issues :(
 

by Mike Veltri on Fri Feb 28, 2014 6:31 am
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On thing that I have never read about here on NS in calibration threads, is the use of a 10 lut video cards like the Nvidia Quadro. Photoshop CS6 supports 10 bit output, and NEC, Ezo and Dell's 3014 will accept 10 bit video input with DisplayPort connections, so I wonder why I don't hear people talking about using 10 Lut cards more often?

It would seem that you get smoother and more accurate color using a 10 bit Card.
 

by E.J. Peiker on Fri Feb 28, 2014 9:28 am
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Mike Veltri wrote:On thing that I have never read about here on NS in calibration threads, is the use of a 10 lut video cards like the Nvidia Quadro. Photoshop CS6 supports 10 bit output, and NEC, Ezo and Dell's 3014 will accept 10 bit video input with DisplayPort connections, so I wonder why I don't hear people talking about using 10 Lut cards more often?

It would seem that you get smoother and more accurate color using a 10 bit Card.
I've been using a 10 bit output nvidia card with display port and NEC 30" Spectravue monitor for about 2 years.  It's great and has fantastic color accuracy - as I said with a dE of less than 0.20.  It's certainly a major step up from the 8 bit much lower accuracy Apple 30" monitor I was using before that.
 

by Ed K on Fri Feb 28, 2014 11:03 am
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Another vote for the SV models. This week I replaced my 23" Apple cinema display with a NEC PA272W-BK-SV with spectraview. Calibrating with the spectraview is straight forward & IMO much easier than my old Eye-1 display 2. I set my Intensity to 100, Gama 2.2, & WP D65 and the prints on my 3880 are a perfect match. BTW after calibration the DE measured .07. I don't think you'll have any regrets for including the spectraview.
 

by Charlie Woodrich on Fri Feb 28, 2014 4:14 pm
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Dear All,

Thanks once again for your very well considered and sound advice.

Charlie
 

by Royce Howland on Sat Mar 01, 2014 12:55 am
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Mike Veltri wrote:On thing that I have never read about here on NS in calibration threads, is the use of a 10 lut video cards like the Nvidia Quadro. Photoshop CS6 supports 10 bit output, and NEC, Ezo and Dell's 3014 will accept 10 bit video input with DisplayPort connections, so I wonder why I don't hear people talking about using 10 Lut cards more often?

It would seem that you get smoother and more accurate color using a 10 bit Card.
There are benefits of 10-bit display output, but as noted it's supported only on a few video cards which are typically more expensive. Support has been historically troublesome, with common compatibility issues between cards, ports, drivers, apps and monitors. Very few apps even attempt to support 10-bit display, with Photoshop being the major one to support it. But that support is not without challenges; some folks are complaining that Photoshop CC has broken 10-bit display on their systems that were previously working okay with CS6.

So the 10-bit thing remains a bit esoteric for most people, even those who are running a high-end monitor. And for people with a monitor with a built-in 12-bit or 14-bit LUT, plus the vendor proprietary calibration tool, they are already getting part of the benefit of high bit-depth display. That's due to the calibration correction curves being applied in the monitor at a bit depth that's even higher than 10-bit.

I've shied away from trying to get into 10-bit display myself. I may finally bite the bullet on my next major upgrade; I haven't decided...
Royce Howland
 

by E.J. Peiker on Sat Mar 01, 2014 1:09 am
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Yet another reason to stick with my trusty CS6 ;)
 

by Ron Poppe on Fri Aug 15, 2014 9:42 am
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If I may piggyback on this NEC SpectraView topic, does anyone use the NEC PA 302W with a 15” MacBook Pro?  I am thinking of upgrading my mid 2009 MacBook Pro and 10-year-old 20” ViewSonic monitor with a new 15” MacBook Pro and 30” NEC monitor, and was wondering if there are any negatives to this combination.
Thanks
Ron
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by E.J. Peiker on Fri Aug 15, 2014 9:52 am
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No, should work fine. you just need the right cable to connect the two. Either a display-port cable or a display port to Dual-link DVI cable. The former will give you a higher bit depth.
 

by Charlie Woodrich on Mon Aug 18, 2014 5:07 pm
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E.J. Peiker wrote:There are a number of benefits to the Specrtravue over what youa re using with NEC monitors.  the main one is that it writes the correction tables to the monitor itself rather than using a software interpretation layer.  The other is that it is 10 bits per color rather than 8 bits per color.  I had the same decision to make as you and chose the Spectravue and am very happy that I did.  I regularly get dE values of less than 0.20.
The best dE value I can get is .32.  Is this of any concern?
 

by E.J. Peiker on Mon Aug 18, 2014 6:37 pm
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No, that's a pretty darn good value! Anything under 1 is completely imperceptible by the human eye. And most people can't see a difference under 2.
 

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