Eizo ColorEdge CG243W Monitor

Eizo ColorEdge CG243W Monitor
The Search for the Perfect Monitor

Our quest to find an LCD monitor that accurately portrays what you see in a print continued for this issue. We have been continually frustrated by an inability to match apparently flawless statistics for monitors, prints and (now) viewing booths and finding that we do not have cross-device visual matching.

A couple of things have changed since we last looked at a monitor (which was the NEC SpectraView Reference 2690 in June 2009). With testing and making prints with the GMG ColorProof (see review this issue) we have a body of contract proof quality prints that are certified correct and cross-checked against other spectros and other organisations. In addition X-Rite have updated their monitor calibration software and provided a validation routine. We have also purchased BabelColor software and this too has a number of additional measuring features for us to exploit. Significantly BabelColor also allowed us to validate our viewing booth to ISO 3664 standards (see call-out opposite).

In theory then we should be well placed to make critical comparisons. Practical experience teaches that this remains difficult and we confirmed this by the end of our testing.

The subject monitor was kindly made available by Societies' member, Paul Atkins. He had taken delivery of the latest offering from Eizo, the ColorEdge CG243W and so we lost little time in driving over to take a look at it. This is a 5-star rated monitor in the Colour Confidence line-up, one of only seven which achieve that rating. It is competitively priced at £1,039 ex VAT. At the other end of the scale, Colour Confidence can supply the CG 232W for a mere £9,129 (oh – we'll have two then!).

The CG 243W comes with Color Navigator software, which includes its own validation software. The USB port on the side bezel of the monitor will accept most of the important profiling specros and colorimeters (ColorMunki, Eye-One, DTP94, DTP94B, and MonacoOPTIX from X-Rite, Spyder2 and Spyder 3 from DataColor, and EIZO’s bundled EX1 sensor with the EIZO EasyPIX colour matching too). As you would expect with a monitor of this class it also comes with a hood. It has a native resolution of 1920x1200 pixels, three input ports and may be swivelled into portrait orientation.

We profiled the monitor at 80, 100 and 120 cd/m2 using ColorNavigator. The data obtained were as follows:

We measured the gamut volume as higher than the specification. At 1,454,356 it is about 14% greater than Adobe RGB. We also noted that it completely encompassed the gamut of FOGRA 27.

The statistics, then, are good, but as with other monitors we found that the reference contract proof was not matched between screen and viewing booth. For the Eizo we found that the red of the tracksuit did not match but the cyan-blues did match a reverse of the findings with the SpectraView we tested in June. On our own system a LaCie CRT with good statistics matched the reds but not the cyan-blues, they lacked saturation. As far as we could tell the print matched the image colour data (97% cyan; 1% magenta; 21% yellow; 14% black). There were no closely matched colours in the monitor validation swatch sets, the closest being the Macbeth cyan swatch but even this was some 15 Lab points away. It seems that our test is very stern!

ABOVE: The Canon advertisement below contains a very high cyan colour underneath the headline 'Let's Play' and it proved to be the most difficult to match screen to print. The press output was a good match. The graph shows how the rich cyan was not tested during the validation procedure of ColorNavigator. The entire cyan field is under-represented in the swatches that are tested. The nearest came from the Macbeth cyan in another test altogether and is shown to the right and a little up from the large cyan circle, representing the colour of the Canon advert. The red of the tracksuit (red circle) is, however, represented quite closely in the test data. The plot also shows how much more the saturation values are tested with the ColorNavigator compared with the Macbeth swatch set which are predominantly in-board of them (ie closer to the origin of the plot the neutral, 0:0 point).

OVERALL

This is an impressive monitor and should be high on the list of possibles for photographers looking for precision in their colours. A perfect match of colours across from screen to contract proof was not achieved but we have certainly made progress in that direction, along with quite a lot of refinement to our characterisation testing – we're getting there slowly!

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