The LaCie Photon 18 Blue LCD flat panel display.

The LCD flat panel display advantages are well-known--a smaller footprint, lower weight, greater energy efficiency, and more consistent color performance over the lifetime of the monitor. Until recently however, the LCD flat panel display has not provided the color gamut needed for photographic image processing.

The LaCie Photon 18 Blue, an 18" LCD flat panel display, has been added to the company's line of Electron Blue CRT monitors that have achieved a strong reputation in the graphics community. In addition to good color image reproduction, the 1280x1024 resolution, brilliance and sharpness, the Photon 18 Blue offers the digital photographer a level of critical image viewing advantageous to work in the digital darkroom. There's also an ergonomic bonus--the monitor can be rotated 90 for either portrait or landscape viewing, easily accommodating photo images made in either format.

It may not be immediately apparent and self-evident to a photographer just starting out doing digital darkroom image processing, but the quality of the results with computer processing is entirely dependent on what can be seen of the image on screen. Every action taken, from acquiring images with a scanner through adjusting them in Photoshop to printing them with an ink jet, rests entirely on how the image is perceived as it is displayed on screen. Adjustments to alter the image quality are made on a perceptual basis, and if your monitor displays little of what is in an image file you have little control over what will result. In essence, the more of what is displayed in the image data the more effectively and accurately a photographer can adjust the values to result in a desired quality of output. So my evaluation of this new graphics monitor, the LaCie Photon 18 Blue, was to determine any advantages it offers.

Working With The LaCie Photon 18 Blue LCD Display
The LaCie Photon 18 Blue supports both analog and digital output from either a PC Windows or Macintosh computer graphics card. It is easy to install and set up, but differs enough from the typical CRT that the instructions should be read and followed precisely. In addition, there is software which must be installed to facilitate rotating the monitor from landscape to portrait mode and back. Finally, the optimum resolution for this monitor is 1280x1024 pixels, so it is advisable to be sure your computer provides sufficient graphics card performance support for this resolution at a True Color setting of 16 million colors. If necessary, you should upgrade by either adding memory to your graphics card or installing one which will support the optimum resolution and color depth. In this regard, both my Windows 2000 machine with a Matrox Millennium G400 Dual graphics card as well as my older Macintosh G3 provided good support and effective performance for the Photon 18 Blue display.

I began getting acquainted with the Photon 18 Blue by installing it on my Windows machine first. I did this to take advantage of the Matrox Dual monitor output running both my Sony CRT and the Photon 18 Blue side by side. My first challenge was to see if I could match the calibrated color balance of my CRT with the Photon 18 Blue.

Using the controls on the LaCie I was able to come close, but the preset color temperatures of 6500 or 7500 Kelvin with the Photon 18 Blue did not match, so I returned the LCD controls to their default settings. Then by switching output plugs, I used the Matrox software control to adjust the Photon 18 Blue and was able to achieve a match with the Sony CRT's hardware color temperature setting of 6500 Kelvin.

Then, with the Photon 18 Blue connected to the primary output channel of the Matrox card, I wanted to at least simulate calibration even though I had only a preliminary ICC/IM profile for the monitor. The finished version that would go out with models released for sale was not quite ready. I did this by first returning the Matrox software adjustments back to zero, and then opened Photoshop's Adobe Gamma and entered the same adjustment values in the setup provided. I then named and created a color management ICM profile through Adobe Gamma. This eyeball method of creating a monitor profile is less than ideal, but to date there are no monitor sensors made for calibrating LCDs. That's to come later. (By the way, if you have a monitor sensor, don't use it on an LCD! The suction cups will cause permanent damage!) When calibration tools are available for LCDs you will not need to re-calibrate frequently, as there are no phosphors in an LCD that deteriorate as they do in a CRT. The only significant and likely affect of aging on color performance may be from the LCD's backlight source, and that should be minor and slight over time.

I use my Windows PC as much for e-mail, writing, and business computing as I do for image processing. It did not take me very long to switch the Photon 18 Blue to portrait mode, as all kinds of typical computer activity is advantaged by a vertical screen format, even the mundane business of web browsing. You hardly ever have to scroll a page, especially at the high 1280x1024 resolution of this display.

Even if you never use the Photon 18 Blue for graphics applications, just reading text with this display is an incredible advantage because it is so crisp and distinct, with every letter clear and easily readable no matter how small the font size. Other computer uses which are at least collateral to photographic image processing, like using a DTP application (Adobe PageMaker in my case) to create documents that include photos is also enhanced by the LaCie display. Again, the high resolution combined with extreme sharpness and screen image brilliance makes aligning type on a page, or placing an image inside a frame, easier and more precise.