Someone last night was telling me about a monitor called a Lacie Electron Blue 22 when I was out talking to someone at MicroCenter and we hit the topic of 3D graphics and rendering. He told me that this monitor was supposed to be revolutionary. Ever heard of it? last monitor post in this forum from me. They are probably out of line and context. Sorry about the stupidity. Best Regards, john

Good monitor, if you can afford it - Karl

I have one (an older version than the one being sold now, but similar). This ended up being a very long post, and I'm sorry about that. However as you might infer, I really like the monitor. It is based on a Mitsubishi Diamondtron tube, which is a great flat screen CRT. It has a USB hub with two external ports for USB peripherals plus a connection inside the monitor for calibration (more on that later). It has two VGA inputs and two upstream USB inputs. You can connect both the video and USB from two computers to the monitor, and switch between them. So the peripherals you attach to the monitor's hub will be visible to whichever computer you are using. Several dozen common screen resolutions are adjusted and burned at the factory. With other large screen monitors I own, whenever I switch to a different resolution I have to tweak the controls to get the screen square and properly level. I never seem to get it exactly right: its usually not square at the corners, which is distracting. The LaCie samples the incoming video signal, compares it to its factory settings, and adjusts itself. The image is always true and square, without me having to do anything. What the salesman probably meant by "revolutionary" is the color calibration. Most monitors can be calibrated by affixing a colorometer to the screen and letting the software create an ICC profile. This is done on the host machine, by reducing the available color space. That is, in the darker portions of the color spectrum, the software "rounds up" the R, G, B values to a higher value to get the proper output from the monitor. So you get less than 8 bits worth of Red, Green, and Blue, because the software has to compensate for the monitor. This may or may not be noticeable, though in severe cases it can cause banding in the dark portions of an image. The LaCie monitors have hardware calibration. You attach a colorometer to the screen, but instead of doing the correction on the host the correction is sent to the monitor via USB. The monitor controller adjusts the voltage driving the electron guns to properly calibrate the output. Your computer continues to use the full 24 bit color space, no reduction at all. I'm not certain this is revolutionary, though it is unsual. Other monitors do this as well, for example all of Apple's ColorSync monitors adjust the voltage to the guns based on the age of the monitor to compensate for the dimming effect as a CRT gets older (even the iMac does this). LaCie's colorometer is $500, not cheap. I was able to borrow one from a friend to do initial calibration, and hope to borrow it again every year to recalibrate. There are a couple other nice touches as well. The monitor is a dark blue color, which I find is less distracting than a beige case around the screen. It comes with a hood to reduce screen glare. I've actually started making hoods out of cardboard for my other monitors based on the positive experience with this one. Pricing on the LaCie is as a high end consumer monitor, or a low end professional model. There are certainly large screen monitors of good quality available for less money. For example, I'm rather fond of the Hitachi line. For the graphics machine, though, its a LaCie.

I have one. Nice, but prefer the Sony f520. Check out the sony web sit. I also have a Mitsubishi. which is nice. But IMO the sont is the best of the lot in this price range. Deberus