TN vs. IPS monitors...

[Emily4Pres]

Hi everyone!

I had my first photo shoot this weekend (SO FUN!) and am in the process of editing my images. At home they look GREAT! I wanted to show them off to a few people at work today but on my work monitor they look...less than great. Needless to say, I freaked out. After doing some research online I'm finding that I have a TN monitor at home which most sites do not recommend for photo editing. What do you all think? Do I really need to spend the $500 for a good IPS monitor or do you have luck with editing your images on your TN? I found a ViewSonic that claims to be IPS for $279 but it sounds too good to be true...Any feedback on the subject would be greatly apprecaited!

Thanks DPS!
<3 Emily

[mrteacherdude]

I'm not in the business (not a pro), but thought I would try to take a stab at your question to keep it going.

In general, it seems that IPS panels are considered to be superior to TN panels for color accuracy and gamut, and viewing angles, but I don't remember the technical reasons why. If I have my information correct, iPads have IPS panels in them which is (probably) why they display photos so beautifully. TN panels are the most common (and typically far less expensive) type put into laptops and general consumer desktop monitors, but there is a lot of diversity in quality of the panels as well as the hardware and drivers in the computer that supports the monitor. Thus you can end up with a lot of variety in how photos appear on different monitors.

While there are certainly exceptions, laptops tend to have lousy panels and lousy hardware to support the monitors and tend to not be suitable for accuracy when editing photos, especially if you want to print out your photos. I had one laptop about five years ago that seemed to have good color/contrast and was very adjustable and highly calibratable (word?); I got great prints using this. When I upgraded my laptop for better performance I took a big hit on the monitor; it sucked. I am "cheap" so am not one to spend a huge amount of money on the best computer on the market because it will piss me off when I can get something better a year later for less, and I like the portability of a laptop for going to work, travel, etc. Anyway, I bought a relatively small (23") NEC monitor with an IPS panel in it and it is GREAT! Colors are beautiful and I can great prints that match what I see on my screen. However, what I see on my screen is not always what I see on other screens, such is the way the monitor world works unfortunately. Incidentally, being "cheap," I shopped around for the least expensive IPS monitor I could find that had good reviews. I think I paid about $250, so $279 sounds like a decent price. I found List of IPS monitors to be one of several good places to conduct research on IPS panels.

Another thing you might consider, if you haven't already, is calibrating your existing monitor. It is possible to get "ok" (although many will disagree with me on this one), calibration without using external calibration tools. There are websites that will help you through this, and if you are using a PC based system with windows 7 ( I don't know about other systems), there is a calibration tool that you can use on the computer that will help you optimize your screen.

It should be noted that there are other variables to how images appear on a screen, such as ambient light and color space. You can have a really great monitor with great color reproduction, but your images still won't look good on other monitors if they are not calibrated, use a different color space, the images are viewed under different ambient light conditions, etc.

Hope this helps

[Doug Pardee]

I guess it depends on how particular you are. The TN monitors are usually tough to calibrate, and even when calibrated the colors vary from side-to-side because of the different viewing angles. Not too much of a problem on a tiny netbook screen, where the range of viewing angles is small; a bigger problem on a large desktop screen like you're probably going to want for photo editing. If you're okay with the variation, fine. Me, I can't deal with TN.

There are some relatively inexpensive IPS monitors out there, basically e-IPS which is a high-efficiency variant of IPS that needs much less backlight power which in turn means much lower prices (and less electric usage). IPS gives very stable color rendition at a wide range of viewing angles, and usually calibrates very nicely. By the way, you can spot an IPS screen when it's turned on because blacks have just a bit of a purplish shade to them.

In-between are the MVA and PVA displays. They're definitely superior to TN displays. If you can't find an IPS display that you want to afford, you might consider one of the xVA models.

By the way, I don't know if it's still true, but it used to be that if you called Dell's Small Business line and talked with one of their business sales staff, you could get a significant discount off of the retail price even if you're not officially a business. They'll just write up the invoice as something like Emily4Pres Enterprises.