The most important Hardware - a good Monitor

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#1

Hi,
with this i would like to start a discussion which i found only very rare in this community, and i need a good advice.

From my point of view, the monitor is the most important piece of hardware an a CG Computer. Tons of Ram, a mighty Titan Graphic Card and a Graphics Tablet do not help, if you actually can not SEE what you are doing.

Over the last projects, i failed a several times because my Monitor was not calibrated well, and a also failed as i started to print my artworks onto real life canvas. If you interchange your works with others, or if you sent you works to a printing service, it can cause disappointing results when there is some wrong with the colors or values that look good on your monitor, but suck on other displays or canvas.

So, here are my questions to start the discussion:

  • What do you think it the best Monitor, which is also affordable, say under 500$?
  • Does it pay of to switch to a 4K Display? Do i need 4 times the Graphic power in Blender for a 4K Display?
  • is there a Blender “Image to real life Canvas” Support to simulate ICC Profiles (Soft Proofing) like in PS or Gimp?

I’m looking forward to your answers!

#2

  1. I don’t know about price but I feel you typically get what you pay for. I have 2xDell 30" at work and 1xDell 30" at home plus a regular cheap crapscreen which is so bad I’m considering a secondary 30" also at home. The cheap ones have horrific color that change with how you sit. If color is extremely important (it’s not to me, I’m a hobbyist and I prefer big over superquality) I’ve had Eizo screens in the past which are incredible, but they’re not exactly cheat (haven’t checked lately).

  2. Two guys at work have 40" 4k screens. They are cheap but pretty good actually, but came with fixed stands. They swear to this for using 4 full screen applications at once, but I personally didn’t like them as the pixel size just was too small. Even at 30" 2560x1600 I find it a hazzle to find that one pixel that lets me resize views.

As for power, yes and no. I don’t expect power to go up just because you work in Blender at higher resolution, but you will start making windows bigger and that can have a significant impact. Twice the size on the live preview may be enough to crash the gfx card/driver, and final renders will tend to take longer just because you are likely to render out in bigger sizes.

  1. I have no idea.
#3

Hi Carl,
thanks for your advice. I also stumbled over Eizo brand displays, they seem to be a good choice when it comes to aspects of color correct printing.

#4

with this budget 500$, and printing it will be hard to get anything amazing(eizo cx24) but its way above your budget. So for 500$ lg lg 27mb85r should be ok.

@edit, another option would be benq sw2700pt

#5

You didn’t say if you already have one, but if not be sure to budget for a colorimeter, so that your new display will be calibrated and profiled correctly. :slight_smile:

#6

I think that the EIZO CS230 is in your budget - it is a great semi-pro monitor, but it is only fullHD. If you need higher resolution I would go for Dell Ultrasharp - pretty good quality for good money.

#7

Hi all,
thanks for the good advices; i think i will switch to a Eizo CS2420 which is a bit ofer budget, but its better to wait a while than buy fast but cheap.
More important is to manage 16bit LUT in order to get the colors right. im still not totally into this topic, but there are a lot of good advices here: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Sobotka/Color_Management/Calibration_and_Profiling

#8

Same dilemma here.

Is G-sync worth the extra money, or is that just for gaming galore?

Edit:
Sorry…just Youtubed it.


Great explaination of G-Sync

#9

The best example of gsync ive seen starts at 1:20

I had same problem few weeks ago. And decided to buy a bit better gaming monitor. Asus mg279q, its nice but now i would buy LG from my previous post. this 144hz aint that amazing and g-sync/freesync is hard to notice in most games. LG is cheaper, has same/better color reproduction, can be calibrated.