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I have been looking at picking up a bigger monitor than my Dell 2001fp. I will be doing some fairly heavy phote editing on it. I have spent a lot of time browsing these forums and various online sites. Since I'm not a pro, just a hobbyist, I really don't want to go crazy and get something like an Eizo. A lot of people seem to like the 23" ACD, especially for the better colors than some of the other panels. So I head down to a computer store today and spent some time playing around on one. Wow - what a disappointment. I spent about a half an hour trying to tweak the thing on a Power Mac and could not get a good picture out of it. Washed out colors, poor blacks, and overall just screaming average. Now I realize a sample size of one is not fair, it was under fluorescent lights, and the monitor wasn't calibrated, but I guess I just expected more. The USB and firewire connectors are also in a hard to get to position and the monitor doesn't even have a height adjustment.
Kind of dejected, I wandered around looking at other monitors and saw a Samsung 243t monitor (too bad they didn't have the 244t) hooked up to a cheapie HP entry level computer with an onboard video card - and the thing looked pretty good. Not great, but surprisingly better than the ACD was.
From everything thing I've read, I'm guessing that the ACD was a dud and a calibrated one under the normal lights in my home office would probably look fine, but it just kind of made me uneasy about dropping a grand on a monitor that didn't blow me away.
Kind of dejected, I wandered around looking at other monitors and saw a Samsung 243t monitor (too bad they didn't have the 244t) hooked up to a cheapie HP entry level computer with an onboard video card - and the thing looked pretty good. Not great, but surprisingly better than the ACD was.
From everything thing I've read, I'm guessing that the ACD was a dud and a calibrated one under the normal lights in my home office would probably look fine, but it just kind of made me uneasy about dropping a grand on a monitor that didn't blow me away.