LaCie photon20vision still good?

[BarnacleGrim]

I use a 7 year old LaCie photon20vision, which was pretty high end at the time. I know CRTs degrade over time, but what about LCDs? I might have a colour sensitive project coming up, so I ran the calibration assistant. It looks better to my eye now, but am I getting the right colours, objectively speaking?

Or do I need to spend big bucks on hardware calibration, or worse yet, a new display?

 

[24bit]

I would not call myself an expert, but from my understanding of physics, a digitally driven device like TFT subunits will either work or not work.

A TFT will not degrade in the way the CRTs did. If you get dead subpixels, you´ll easily discover them. The backlight is another story, I never

saw two exactly equal TFT backlights with my displays until now. The flourescent backlight tubes may degrade over the years and give you

an uneven lighting by ageing, as the tubes become shady at the ends. The newer LED backlights will suffer less from age, I suppose.

Although the backlight may become a bit uneven, the backlight´s colour temperature should be rather steady until the day the lighting is almost dead.

After all, I think you should be on the safe side with your monitors calibration and an additional utility like Adobe gamma, which was included with Photoshop.

If you are thinking of professional DTP, you will do some proofing anyway or use a Pantone (or similar) colour system.

 

[BarnacleGrim]

Thanks for the advice! Semiprofessional, at any rate. It's something I've wanted to dabble in for many years, but never took seriously enough to do something about. I guess I want to work with a printer who can do the proofing for me. And that I should make an entry in my budget for a set of those Pantone books.

So I don't have to worry about temperature or relative RGB values, only brightness? The perceived brightness would of course depend on the lighting in the room too, nearly impossible to keep consistent. But I still haven't noticed a single dead pixel, something I believe this display was praised for back in the day.