Wrote most of this up several days ago and then forgot to post it.
Admittedly veering a little bit from strictly PPC discussion:
When in photo classes, the WISDOM THAT CAME FROM UP ON HIGH, which I have never seen specific research to prove, is that LCDs of the time (2008 or so) drift in color. As they age, the drifting happens faster and more severely. At about three years of age, they drift so much and so fast that they become useless for color sensitive work within a few minutes. (Perhaps that was at the end of the third year.)
In particular, the advice was in the first year, calibrate about once a month. In the second year, calibrate about once a week, and in the third year, calibrate daily. Because LEDs are a much more stable, in theory you should be able to go longer between calibrations, and they should last much longer.
However, CRTs are similarly "unstable" to CCFL backlighting, and there's also the issue of physical of the phosphors wearing out over time, which could change or reduce the amount and accuracy of color a CRT can display over time. Whether a normal person doing office tasks will ever notice on a CRT otherwise in good health even in an improbably long time, I don't know.
About calibrating:
My colorimeter, which is an i1 Display unit of some sort, which I bought in like 2007 or 2008, takes about 10 minutes to get and apply calibration. Calibrating daily would be annoying but not impossible. By the time you enter the fourth year and the monitor needs calibration approximately hourly, I'd be tossing it out or putting it on the desk of an assistant doing work that doesn't critically need accurate color. (Accountant, file/workflow wrangler who is merely moving files, craigslist)
About color rendition in general:
Although LCD color rendition has never been the best it has been good enough for professional creatives working with color-sensitive material for on the order of about a decade or so now. The biggest problem has been that with LCD technology there's a relatively big rift between the middle and the top, even now. In 2008, I switched my own photo management/editing workflow over to some ThinkPads (First an R61 then a T400) and although they work fine for the task, the biggest problem I've had has always been with blues -- the displays on ThinkPads, though able to be calibrated, just wont' properly display certain ranges of blue. There'll be a beautiful deep blue sky that you know to be a really great gradient in a photo, and it'll just be a big blotch.
I have been meaning to test calibration drift on a new-ish LED backlit monitor. The calibration itself won't be that impressive, I'm pretty sure it's a 6-bit panel.
Today, it's easier than ever to find good panels, both in terms of appearance and in terms of systems (laptops, tablets, AIOs) that come pre-calibrated and in terms of displaying as much as possible of the selected gamut. Although there are still troubles displaying all of certain gamuts and it seems like we're moving away from Adobe RGB toward DCI-P3 as the preferred advanced color gamut.
Admittedly veering a little bit from strictly PPC discussion:
When in photo classes, the WISDOM THAT CAME FROM UP ON HIGH, which I have never seen specific research to prove, is that LCDs of the time (2008 or so) drift in color. As they age, the drifting happens faster and more severely. At about three years of age, they drift so much and so fast that they become useless for color sensitive work within a few minutes. (Perhaps that was at the end of the third year.)
In particular, the advice was in the first year, calibrate about once a month. In the second year, calibrate about once a week, and in the third year, calibrate daily. Because LEDs are a much more stable, in theory you should be able to go longer between calibrations, and they should last much longer.
However, CRTs are similarly "unstable" to CCFL backlighting, and there's also the issue of physical of the phosphors wearing out over time, which could change or reduce the amount and accuracy of color a CRT can display over time. Whether a normal person doing office tasks will ever notice on a CRT otherwise in good health even in an improbably long time, I don't know.
About calibrating:
My colorimeter, which is an i1 Display unit of some sort, which I bought in like 2007 or 2008, takes about 10 minutes to get and apply calibration. Calibrating daily would be annoying but not impossible. By the time you enter the fourth year and the monitor needs calibration approximately hourly, I'd be tossing it out or putting it on the desk of an assistant doing work that doesn't critically need accurate color. (Accountant, file/workflow wrangler who is merely moving files, craigslist)
About color rendition in general:
Although LCD color rendition has never been the best it has been good enough for professional creatives working with color-sensitive material for on the order of about a decade or so now. The biggest problem has been that with LCD technology there's a relatively big rift between the middle and the top, even now. In 2008, I switched my own photo management/editing workflow over to some ThinkPads (First an R61 then a T400) and although they work fine for the task, the biggest problem I've had has always been with blues -- the displays on ThinkPads, though able to be calibrated, just wont' properly display certain ranges of blue. There'll be a beautiful deep blue sky that you know to be a really great gradient in a photo, and it'll just be a big blotch.
I have been meaning to test calibration drift on a new-ish LED backlit monitor. The calibration itself won't be that impressive, I'm pretty sure it's a 6-bit panel.
Today, it's easier than ever to find good panels, both in terms of appearance and in terms of systems (laptops, tablets, AIOs) that come pre-calibrated and in terms of displaying as much as possible of the selected gamut. Although there are still troubles displaying all of certain gamuts and it seems like we're moving away from Adobe RGB toward DCI-P3 as the preferred advanced color gamut.