need quick advice, 300 dollar budget

[Ikasu]

this panel isn't for me, but my bro is planning to pick up a Dell 2208WFP.

The reason why I'm making this thread, is he's going to pick one up tomorrow. He's a professional designer which is an issue, his budget is quite small so it limits him from nabbing a high quality IPS monitor. I recommended the 2007WFP, but considering it's a panel lottery and that it's older makes it difficult.

Is there anything else I should be looking for? I know it's a long shot, but any 22" pva panel's?...Considering he's gone to Art Center college of design, and works on some very high profile jobs, it makes me cringe that he's getting a TN panel. He's currently running a uber specced Mac pro on the old 17" green bezel g4 monitor. He banged it up transporting it to a studio and ended up damaging the screen slightly.

Considering his limited budget, should I even bother looking at anything else for him? or should he just nab a 2208WFP?

Any advice will be great, but the faster the better, he plans to pick one up tomorrow.

 

[scarredtaka]

Can his college loan him anything?

If he needs good, dead on accurate color for design, with that budget, I would be hesitant to recommend almost any LCD he could probably buy, and would recommend trying to find an older CRT. However, if color isn't so much of an issue, than I would say that the LCD would probably work. However, 22" panels are notorious for being lower quality than other panels. They have a very fast response time, but have lower quality than you may be able to get with a smaller, say 20" monitor.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001087

This Samsung 20" monitor has a higher quality panel, and is still in your budget.

However, if he does buy an LCD, or any other monitor for that matter, I would recommend he pick up something like this.

http://www.amazon.com/ColorVision-S...bs_1?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1198733905&sr=8-1

This is a monitor calibrator, and will allow him to get more accurate color from the monitor than he could get by hand tuning alone. It is compatible with almost every monitor out there, CRT's, laptop screens, LCD's, etc. If he could borrow this from his college, that would save him money. They aren't that expensive though, that one's only about $60.

Hope that helps.

 

[WldWzl]

That is some good information, thank you, how well do those devices work? I have seen them before but always wondered how well they worked in the real world.

 

[nigerian_businessman]

Considering his limited budget, he should be buying a good, used CRT. He should easily be able to find something in the 20 to 22in range with a trinitron or diamondtron tube.

 

[scarredtaka]

I've never used one in person, but there have been several people on this forum who have used them with good results. Here's a quote from someone else on this forum.

During calibration, I ended up setting the brightness to 10 and contrast to 75. The last step of guidance from the Huey gave me three colour temps to chose from: D55, D65, D75 (which I assume are 5500, 6500, 7500). It also gave me a choice of three gamma settings: of 1.80, 2.20, 2.40. I selected colour temp of D65 and gamma of 2.40.

I decided to put all of this to test. Uninstalled the Huey, rebooted and hand set everything to the numbers above; first on the panel (except for gamma) and then a second time via the NVIDIA control panel, including sliding the gamma around. Everything by hand failed... miserably... and I have not the slightest clue as to why. The only idea that comes to mind is even though my panel RGB does indicate a temp choice of 6500, the Huey must somehow push something a bit different.

So, the long short of it is I reinstalled the Huey Pro, ran the calibration again and BAM... back to a beautiful screen. I am unsure exactly as to what this thing does that I cannot duplicate, but I am not going to worry about it. It even monitors the ambient lighting in my room and tweaks the calibration instantaneously to match. Best $90 I ever spent, as I can use it to calibrate any monitor AND it made a $425 27.5" TN lcd look better than my 26" S-IPS that cost over $1K.

The calibrator he is using is a little bit different than the one I talked about earlier, and is here, for about 100.

http://www.amazon.com/Pantone-MEU11...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1198779386&sr=8-1

Hope this helps you!