Apple LED Cinema versus the Hewlett-Packard LP2475w - Part Two

After posting my brief comparison of the color gamut displayed by the Apple 24″ LED Cinema Display and the Hewlett-Packard 24″ LP2475w, I was asked if the comparison was fair as the computers used to build the profiles of the two monitors were different.  While the only piece of hardware that truly matters when comparing the profiles built is the display adapter (video card), this component was, indeed, different between the HP laptop and the MacBook Pro.

In addition to comparing the color gamut of the monitors to the Adobe RGB color space, which is used by many digital SLR cameras, I was also asked what ramification viewable gamut had on printing using Epson 4000 and Epson 4800 print engines.  I compare the gamut viewable by the monitors with Epson’s ICC profiles (for both printers) of Enhanced Matte Photo Paper and Premium Luster Photo Paper, both of which now have strange names: Ultra Premium Presentation Paper Matte and Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster.

Method:

The equipment used for this comparison was  a MacBook Pro v3.1 (with a DVI connection) with an nVidia GeForce 8600M GT video card, an Intel Core2Duo 2.2 GHz processor and 2GB RAM running OS X 10.5.8.  The calibration unit remained the same as in the previous comparison: a Gretag-Macbeth / X-Rite Eye One Pro spectrophotometer.

Unlike the laptop used for the previous comparison, the DVI connector meant that there was no obvious way to connect the MacBook Pro to the new Apple 24″ LED Cinema Display, which has only a “Mini DisplayPort” connector.  To overcome this problem, an Atlona AT-DP200 Mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter bridged the gap between the monitor and the laptop.  So long as an older style MacBook is plugged into the monitor with this adapter–and the USB cable from the monitor is also plugged into the laptop–the user has complete control over resolution and brightness.  There are no color controls, unlike the HP monitor, but this has been true of all cinema displays from Apple over the past few years, and that did not stop many a PC user to purchase an Apple screen.

The ICC color profiles created by the Eye One Match 3 software were then compared using a trial version of Gamutvision 1.3.7 with a rendering intent of “None” on a two-dimensional XY Chromaticity (saturation map) projection.

Results after the jump!

Results:

Monitor Comparison

Once again, the primary interest of this comparison is color gamut.  However, despite evening the odds by using the same equipment with both monitors, the results are virtually identical to those achieved when using a brand new MacBook Pro (with a Mini DisplayPort plug) and an HP laptop running Windows Vista:

CLICK ABOVE TO ENLARGE: Solid lines represent Apple 24" LED Cinema Display (left) and HP 24" LP2475w (right), respectively, within the Adobe RGB 1998 color space, marked by dotted lines.

Is there variability?

I compared the monitor profiles generated for this test (using the MacBook Pro v3.1 with OS X 10.5.8 and an nVidia GeForce 8600M GT video card) with those from my previous posting, generated using a new MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard 10.6.1 and an HP Pavilion laptop.  The lack of any appreciable difference between the two plots–in fact, there is NO difference in the comparison of the two profiles of the HP monitor–suggests that, at the least, our calibration equipment was functioning well and yielding consistency irrespective of platform (as should be expected):

CLICK ABOVE TO ENLARGE: Apple 24" LED Cinema Display calibrations with a new MacBook Pro (dotted) and an older model using an Atlona adapter (solid), left, and the HP LP2475w calibrations with an HP Pavilion TX2000 laptop (dotted) and an older model MacBook Pro with DVI connector (solid), right.

Monitor and Printer Comparisons:

For these comparisons, I used the standard Epson .ICC profiles bundled with the print driver for the Epson Pro 4000 and Epson Pro 4800 print engines.

The dotted patterns represent the paper profiles:

Apple 24″ LED Cinema Display and Hewlett-Packard LP2475w Compared to Epson Pro 4000 and Epson Pro 4800 printers using Epson Enhanced Matte Photo Paper
Solid lines represent the Apple Display (left) and HP 2475w (right) compared to the Epson Pro 4000 Enhanced Matte Paper profile, marked by dotted lines.	Solid lines represent the Apple Display (left) and HP 2475w (right) compared to the Epson Pro 4800 Enhanced Matte Paper-Matte Black profile, marked by dotted lines.
Apple 24″ LED Cinema Display and Hewlett-Packard LP2475w Compared to Epson Pro 4000 and Epson Pro 4800 printers using Epson Premium Luster Photo Paper
Solid lines represent the Apple Display (left) and HP 2475w (right) compared to the Epson Pro 4000 Premium Luster Photo Paper profile, marked by dotted lines.	Solid lines represent the Apple Display (left) and HP 2475w (right) compared to the Epson Pro 4800 Premium Luster Photo Paper profile, marked by dotted lines.

Conclusions:

As I have stated before, my interest in comparing these two monitors lies in the color gamut that is possible to display.  The HP LP2475w has been categorized as a “wide gamut” monitor by many other reviewers, HP does have a (short) mention about color gamut on its Web site, and this title seems to be deserved.  Apple, at least on its Web site,  does not make any claims about the color gamut of its 24″ LED Cinema.  So, is this comparison even a fair one?

I believe that it is important to compare these two monitors as Apple gained a reputation in the past few years for producing monitors that were very reliable for photo and graphics applications.  As they increased in popularity with photographers (Mac and PC users alike), their price went up with them.  Apple is now charging a premium price for a product that I do not believe fairs as well as a $550.00 solution from Hewlett-Packard.

However, I have not–and will not–address other concerns or elements that might also contribute to the two displays’ respective price-points, such as manufacturing tolerances, panel consistency, build quality, or design.

After reviewing the results of this batch of tests with those from my previous posting about these two displays, using the same video card / laptop to calibrate the two monitors produced nearly identical results, and thus confirming my original conclusions: the HP LP2475w is ideally suited to soft proofing for inket printing and other color-critical applications when on a budget.  (If you’re not on a budget, buy an Eizo.)

That the inkjet printers have arrived at the point that they can exceed parts of the Adobe RGB color space would indicate that a monitor that displays as wide a gamut is possible is the most logical choice for inkjet printing today.  As it nearly displays the Adobe RGB color space for a bargain of a price, I stand by the tremendous value I found in the HP LP2475w that I concluded in my previous comparison of these two displays.  The Apple screen isn’t “bad,” and may, in fact, have a higher build quality, but in this particular measurement, it is bested by a monitor that costs $300 less.  A savings that is more than enough for people to purchase a colorimeter, such as the Spyder 3, to make their new monitor display accurate colors!

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | View Original Post | 4 comments | Filed under Reviews | Tags: Apple LED Cinema Display, color gamut, color management, comparison, HP LP2475w, monitors, Reviews

Preamble:

I really don’t review many products except those that I own and use.  However, an opportunity arose at the University of Missouri to compare, side-by-side, the Apple Cinema LED monitor (selling for $860) with what has been my workhorse monitor over the past year, the Hewlett-Packard LP 2475w (selling for $550).  (You can read my earlier review of that monitor here.) Physically, there are a lot of differences between these two monitors, and one of those differences might actually play a role in performance.

First and foremost, the “looks” category goes to the Apple display.  That said, the Apple LED display comes only in a glossy screen.  Eek!  Everything about its design was appealing up to that point.  The HP monitor is very straightforward, no-frills, and with lots of buttons for accessing its menu, switching to different inputs (it can accept VGA, DVI, Component Video, HDMI, DisplayPort, etc., etc.), and, of course, switching it “off.”

The Apple monitor has no buttons, and can only connect via “Mini DisplayPort,” which is currently found only on the latest Mac products.  I can only surmise that Apple and its shareholders were sick and tired of the entire world of photographers on budgets buying their screens, and making money for the company.  </satire>  Furthermore, the lack of a menu in which one can control brightness, contrast, and the red, green, and blue outputs is sorely lacking.

As this is a short review, I’ll get to the meat of the comparison (after the jump!):

Both monitors were profiled using an Eye-One spectrophotometer on the evening of October 14, 2009, and both were creating using the latest version of X-Rite’s Eye-One Match software:
The Apple screen was calibrated on a friend’s MacBook Pro 15″ laptop that was running Snow Leopard (10.6.1), and the software was set to calibrate to 6500 Kelvin, Gamma 2.2, and a luminance of 120 cd/m². This required lowering the brightness down seven “stops” from full brightness.

The HP display was calibrated on my personal HP tx2000 laptop running Windows Vista 32-bit Home Edition, and the software was set to calibrate to 6500 Kelvin, Gamma 2.2, and a luminance of 120 cd/m².  This required adjusting the brightness to 16, and changing the red, green, and blue channels in the monitor’s menu.

I have then displayed the two profiles created within the Adobe RGB 1998 color space using Gamut Vision 1.3.7 (one of these days I’ll buy it, okay?), with rendering intent set to “none.”

The graphs speak for themselves:

Apple 24" LED Cinema Display (solid) within the Adobe RGB 1998 color space (dotted).

HP 2475w (solid) within the Adobe RGB 1998 color space (dotted).

Conclusion:

As a photographer, there are a lot of considerations that should go into buying a monitor, but chief among them should be how well the monitor calibrates.  While both the Apple LED Cinema and the HP 2475w will calibrate to 6500 Kelvin and gamma 2.2, the HP display has a significantly greater color gamut, almost completely displaying the colors possible within the Adobe RGB 1998 color space.  The Apple display does well, but falls short  in this comparison.

I do wonder if the Apple display would perform better if there were actual controls for the red, green, and blue channels.  I know that the Eye-One Match software is not configured to talk to a monitor’s LUT (if the one on the Apple display is even writable).  However, the LUT on the HP monitor is equally inaccessible, making this a fair comparison.

Personally, I am biased against glossy screens (how I own an HP laptop with a glossy screen is beyond me–it will never happen again, period) but I tried to keep an open mind as Apple’s now discontinued line of Cinema Displays calibrated well and a lot of working photographers liked them.  This new breed is very different.

If you own the latest MacBook Pro with a Mini Displayport, the Apple should be considered because it does some nifty things, like charge a laptop while connected to the monitor.  However, when you consider performance, it seems like a $300 premium to get something that doesn’t calibrate as well as the HP.

I continue to stand by my HP 2475w as it performs extremely well for its price point.  It’s not an Eizo–frankly, it’s not even an NEC–but it is a clear winner over Apple’s new offering.

Update:

On October 26, 2009, I published a follow-up to this review that addresses some of the weaknesses of this original comparison, with some surprising results.

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | View Original Post | 3 comments | Filed under Reviews | Tags: Apple LED Cinema Display, color gamut, color management, comparison, HP LP2475w, monitors, Reviews

As of August 2009, this monitor has fallen in price to a very attractive $555.00 at Amazon.  I mention this because this remains one of my most popular reviews, and if you decide to purchase this monitor, and found this review critical to your decision-making process, I would greatly appreciate it if you would click on my link to complete the sale.  Alternatively, the monitor is available at B&H.  Thank you!

Preamble

I rarely review products–people who know me well are the ones who might ask my opinion of equipment I’ve used, but I often refer people to DP Review or The Luminous Landscape for more in-depth analysis than I can provide.  About two years ago, a somewhat cursory, but authoritative, review of the Hewlett-Packard LP2465 monitor by E.J. Peiker in the forums at NatureScapes.net led that product to become something of a sensation among nature photographers looking for an affordable 24″ monitor of good quality.  (The primary audience for NatureScapes is nature photographers.)

More after the jump…

Screen Technology

The HP 2465 had an S-PVA LCD panel and retailed at a price slightly below Apple’s 20″ widescreen cinema display.  Although smaller, the Apple monitor uses an S-IPS LCD panel; S-IPS is a superior display technology to S-PVA and allows for greater color consistency across viewing angles, but is much more expensive than S-PVA, and, in turn, S-PVA is more expensive than the most common LCD panel type, TN film.

What about Apple?

As a graduate student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, I work with Apple Cinema Displays almost daily.  They are well-made, and when properly calibrated, are among the best sub $1,000.00 monitors.  Above that is the domain of Eizo.  However, what the 2465, and its successor, the 2475w, along with a handful of NEC, HP, Dell, Acer, LG, and Philips displays, offers is more screen real-estate for the money.  While they sound similar, the difference between a 20″ and 24″ monitor can be astonishing.  For my own purposes, I wanted the extra screen space.
That said, I cannot properly compare the Apple Cinema Displays–either the 20″ or the discontinued 23″–to the HP 2475w on a technical (only qualitative) level, and will not attempt to do so.

In comes the 2475w

HP discontinued the 2465 and replaced it with the LP2475w, which is built upon an H-IPS LCD panel.  H-IPS is the latest technological improvement on  In-Plane-Switching (IPS) technology.  The retail price remains similar, trading at many stores, such as Amazon.com, for $620.  The shipping weight of the package is 26 pounds (11.8 Kg), so free shipping is a great deal.

The monitor is not flashy: no aluminum styling, no one-cable-solves-all like the Apple displays.  But it has every connector under the sun, including Display Port and HDMI, dual DVI ports, S-Video, and Component-Input.  Additionally, the monitor sports a four-port USB hub.  That said, the 2475w’s real feature is that it can display almost all of the Adobe RGB color space.  A “wide gamut” monitor, this means that non-color-managed applications (think: the entire Microsoft Windows OS!!!) is overly saturated, even after proper calibration.  But for Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, and other color-managed creative applications, this is a very solid monitor for its price.

Calibration involves toning down the brightness considerably–in addition to adjusting the RGB values, I’ve turned mine down to 17 on a scale of 100 to achieve a brightness of 120 cd/m².  Note: many people think their prints are “too dark” when, in fact, their monitors are actually too bright.  Even 120 cd/m² is not entirely ideal: some Eizo monitors can calibrate down to a preferable 80 cd/m², such as the ColorEdge CG301W 30″ monitor, but at a considerable price tag!  The display was then calibrated to color temperature of 6500 K, gamma 2.2, and profiled with a Gretag Macbeth EyeOne Pro and Integrated Color’s Color Eyes Display.

I was keen to look at how gamut of this new monitor compared to Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB, as well as how great an improvement this would prove to be over the monitor that I was replacing (which has now become my second display), a Samsung Syncmaster 19″.

HP 2475w (solid form) inside the Adobe RGB 1998 gamut (wireframe)

HP 2475w (solid form) inside the ProPhoto RGB gamut (wireframe)

Samsung Syncmaster 173s (solid form) inside the Adobe RGB 1998 gamut (wireframe)

Results

Clearly, the HP 2475w is a marked improvement over my older, TN-film based Syncmaster.  The HP 2475w calibrated very well, and I have much greater confidence that what I see on screen is color-accurate.  Note that the monitor displays slightly fewer greens than Adobe RGB describes, but also can handle more blues and magentas.

I would suggest that one issue I have discovered already with this monitor is that it does take an average of 20 minutes for the screen to properly “warm up.”  It is common advice for people to wait to calibrate and profile their monitors until they have been active for at least 30 minutes.  With the HP, I can notice white backgrounds (on Web pages, for instance) becoming noticeably “whiter” in the first minutes the monitor is on.  The simple solution is to wait half an hour before doing any color-critical work–kill some time: go make coffee or check e-mail!

Color Eyes Display profile validation report for HP 2475w

I ran profile validations of the monitor over the course of last weekend, and found that after shutting down the monitor and re-starting the system cold every few hours, that the validation was very consistent, with a maximum ΔE of 0.88.  You can click on the thumbnail to the left for a larger version of the validation report.

Unfortunately, the monitor does not possess a user-adjustable Look-Up-Table (LUT), so calibration can only be done through changing the video card’s LUT.

NEC does offer 12-bit LUTs that are adjustable on some of their <$1K monitors, but they require NEC’s proprietary calibration software.  LaCie and Eizo also offer this feature, but all of these retail for far more than the 2475w’s $620!

What the HP 2475w represents is very good value.  Almost full Adobe RGB coverage.

Conclusion

For those who would like to upgrade their monitors, but simply do not have the money to afford a higher-end NEC, LaCie, or Eizo, the 2475w should be a strong contender with the Apple offerings.

For another, more in-depth review of the 2475w, I’d recommend TFT-Central’s write-up posted September 2008. Furthermore, TFT-Central provides a searchable database of monitors and their panel types.  For instance, searching for “IPS” within “panel” results in a list of monitors manufactured with S-IPS and H-IPS LCD panels.

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | View Original Post | 5 comments | Filed under Reviews | Tags: Adobe RGB, color gamut, color management, displays, HP LP2475w, monitors, Reviews