When using a digital camera, you need a computer. When using a film camera and you want to show your works on the internet, you need a scanner/computer.

So I was wondering about your monitors. Monitors can make a lot of difference. Some people swear by crt, some argue that tft is nowadays at least as good. Some simply use the monityor that came with their computer.

Cheaper tft's are known to show lots of difference when you move your head only a few inches (10cm). Other tft's can show full adobe rgb...and get very impressive blacks.

So do you care about the quality of your monitor? Do you calibrate it? If you do: with what? Hardware?
Do you use two monitors, ora single one? Which size?
etc etc

To be the first to answer my own questions: I now use a Viewsonic VP930 tft which is 19inch and 1280x1024 pixels. When I bought it, it was a good medium quality monitor with good blacks, and the viewing angle is ok because of the p-mva panel.
I'd love to get a larger monitor (24inch) one day, but the ones I like are quite expensive.
I do care about good colour rendering (within limits) and use the spider3pro hardware calibration. I print with a Canon Pro9000.

There are no Borg. All resistance is fertile.

I'm using an Apple 17" iMac G5 (PowerPC, not Intel), and as some of you may know, that's basically an LCD screen with the computer, DVD-drive, speakers and all other components built-in, all in one thin and slick package. The Apple LCD monitors are known for their good quality, so I never experienced any problems, and never felt the need to go looking for better and pricier alternatives (including calibration hard- and software)... partly because I'm rarely printing images (I don't have a good photo printer... yet). ;o)

We do not see things as they are. ǝɹɐ ǝʍ sɐ sƃuıɥʇ ǝǝs ǝʍ
 

I bought a Samsung SyncMaster T200 a few months back, basically because i wanted a decent sized working area (widescreen) in photoshop (previous screen was a standard dell from about 5 years ago and 4:3 ratio at around the 15" range (it is now my secondary screen for dumping things on)) and because it got decent reviews for the pricerange.  I borrowed a Spyder from work to calibrate both screens, but havent done it again for a long time.  If and when i get a printer i may look into getting a Spyder to calibrate as well - but knowing how much of a hassle it is to colour manage from screen to print i will probably put that off for a while yet :)

"In every colour, there's the light.
In every stone sleeps a crystal.
Remember the Shaman, when he used to say:
Man is the dream of the Dolphin"

Rich Meadows Photography

I use a dirt cheap 1440x900 widescreen Acer monitor and it suits me just fine. Very shapr, good positive black and absolutly no flicker on any refresh rates.

I use an IIyama Vision Master Pro 454 19" (HM903DBT).. yes that's a CRT :)  I got an Acer 17" screen as a second next to it, but that is just to dump my tools and browser etc :)

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies. - Aristotle
-= Glass Eye Photography =- -= My Rendo Gallery =-

Funny that this topic's coming up right now.
I went to the store with my dad yesterday who was looking for a new TFT-monitor. He's also into photography and in one shop he was told that all the TFT-monitors they had there (which were quite a lot) were not really suitable, because they all could cause color-problems. He then bought one in another shop because it was on sale and his old one was a really old tft anyways so the new one just had to be better. But that shop assistant's comment just made me feel that, when my old CRT broke down a few years ago the decision to buy a new CRT (Philips 109 E5)instead of a TFT was the right decision unless I would have wanted to spent a fortune... What really makes me think though is the fact, that you hardly find any CRTs in the shops any more so I really hope mine will "live" for many  more years... I bought my laptop in January (which I normaly use with an extra-keyboard and the CRT) and even though I tried to find one with a good monitor (even took some of my images to the store to test the quality) I still see huge differences between the monitors. Of course it always depends on the surrounding light and stuff, but even though it would sometimes be nicer to have it in the living room I rather leave it in the "office" with the CRT attached.

The problem is not that tft's are bad, but that there are three diffent kinds of tft's, depending on the panel.

• TN, the cheapest, is also the fastest to redraw the screen. It's the typical gamer tft that you find in every store. Its most important weakness is its vertical viewing angle. Stand or sit in front of it, mopve you head up and down by a few inches and you'll see the colours change. Because you'll never know what a colour really looks like, this kind of monitor is not ok for colour-critical work (which is a personal choice you make, not an obligation for making good photographs).
• IPS has much better viewing angles and is more colour-consistent. But it is slower than TH and often shows shadow-trailing and ghost effects when objects are moving fast on the screen, like in games. It's already much better with the H-IPS panels like the new macs, but still not comparable for gamers.
• MVA, and the most used variant S-PVA  have also better viewing angles and the more expensive ones use 10bit dithering to get better colour transition. They tend to be faster than IPS.

S-PVA and H-IPS are more expensive than TN and, apart from the Apple screens, you usually have to order them from more specialised shops. They can (not all do!) show all colours of Adobe RGB.
TN gamers panels, and most CRT (excepting Barco etc) hardly cover s-RGB.

There are no Borg. All resistance is fertile.