Cheap LCD Monitors Not Matching Prints
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| The left side of the photo is what my LCD monitor showed... the right side is what it looked like printed. |
I should also point out that printing photos or artwork on your own printer is exceedingly expensive when compared to having prints professionally printed. The cost of ink is very high. The cost of quality paper is very high. And, to be honest, a Professional Lab will actually print photos at a level of quality that is just not possible on any home printer.
Regardless of where you have your photos printed, you must ensure your computer monitor (or your camera if the photos never make it to the computer) show the photos "correctly". So, what does "correctly" really mean? How do we know that your monitor or camera display is displaying your photos just like they will appear after being printed?
This has been a major problem since the dawn of the digital age and especially so since LCD monitors have been affordable for the average household. Unfortunately, LCD monitors are notoriously too bright, too contrasty, and show entirely too much saturation of color. This is great for browsing the internet and viewing photos online but terrible for printing.
Since we see our photos much more brightly on our LCD computer monitor than they really are, our prints end up looking darker than we expected.
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| The top of this photo is what my LCD monitor showed... the bottom is what it looked like printed. |
Now back to my original topic... I decided to have some of my photos and artwork printed.
I had forgotten that I had not had any of my photos nor artwork printed since last Christmas. Why, you ask? Well, I was so frustrated with my last print job (I had my prints printed three times in order to get it close to being right) that I just put all print jobs on hold until I could figure out how to properly calibrate my monitor to match prints. Then old age struck (as well as my cognitive difficulties caused by my illness) and I completely forgot that I had this problem.
Having long forgotten about this mismatch problem between my monitor and printers, this Christmas I sent over 200 photos to a pro lab to be printed and they all came back to me darker and duller than I had expected. They weren't terrible... they were just darker than expected and duller. As soon as I saw these new prints, I immediately remembered the issue I had last Christmas when I had struggled with the exact same problems!
So, how do we resolve this problem?
Your monitor must be calibrated to a standard. This standard must be the same as the calibration of the monitors and printers where the photos are being printed. Easy, right? Hmmm... maybe not so easy...
Calibration between monitors and printers would be easy if all monitors were of decent quality and if we all had a tool to calibrate our monitors every month or so. Well, unfortunately, most monitors in people's homes are pieces of sh... ummm, junk. These cheap monitors (by the way, "cheap" does not necessarily mean inexpensive... "cheap" means "of poor quality") simply cannot show color, contrast and brightness well enough. As a matter of fact, these cheap monitors are incapable of even showing all the colors in your images!
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| The right side of the photo is what my LCD monitor showed... the left side is what it looked like printed. |
A few days ago, I bought a tool so I could calibrate my LG LCD monitor. It arrived yesterday and I immediately installed the software and connected it to my computer. I tried calibrating my monitor four times only to get the same rather mediocre results each time.
First off, I paid $325 for this monitor three years ago. For me, that is a big chunk of change. Compared to other LCD monitors, this particular monitor manufactured by LG is a fairly decent monitor. Even though this particular monitor is fairly decent by "LCD standards", it is still poor by sRGB standards which is the calibration we need to use to match printers.
A quick note here: High quality photography gear has the ability to capture photos at a higher quality than sRGB but, in order to keep things simple here, I'm going to just use sRGB as the standard since most people only shoot at this level of quality. If we used the higher quality photos, our LCD monitors would be even worse for use in printing.
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| The right side of the photo is what my LCD monitor showed... the left side is what it looked like printed. |
After calibrating my monitor a few times and getting it as close to the sRGB standard as possible, I have found that my monitor is still clipping my highlights, the colors have a shift toward green and I can only view 93% of the color. All-in-all, for an LCD monitor, this isn't terribly bad.
When I try to view a smooth gradient on my monitor, I don't see a smooth transition. I see faint signs of banding instead. In some cases, I not only see pronounced banding but I also see a reddish hue on the edges of the banding. This is a tell-tale sign of a cheapo LCD monitor which will never be able to match a printer profile. This could also be a sign that my monitor is going bad.
Another major issue with LCD monitors is that the brightness and color changes, sometimes drastically, just by moving your head slightly. This is just a fact of LCD monitors. This phenomenon is more pronounced in laptop LCDs than larger desktops but it is still a major drawback of trying to do photo/graphics work on an LCD monitor.
So, how can we view photos and artwork on our LCD monitors and be sure that this is how our prints will appear? In short, we can't. Using a calibration tool to properly adjust the colors, contrast and brightness helps but it only gets us part of the way there because LCD monitors just cannot show us what we need to see.
Needless to say, for me, this means an LCD monitor will not work. For most people, my newly calibrated LCD monitor would probably be just fine for them. After all, showing 93% of sRGB, I suspect this LCD monitor of mine is far better than most. I have always had high standards, however, and photography and art is a very serious hobby for me. I work hard at getting my photos and artwork to look exactly how I want them to look. If my monitor is showing me something different, then there is a major problem!
While I was waiting for my new calibration tool to arrive, I did a lot of research on this topic. I had to understand the problem if I was going to correct it. I found that today's LCD monitors simply are not up to the task of matching prints. Considering this, I was not surprised to find that my LCD, although it calibrated fairly well, did not calibrate well enough. Before the calibration tool even arrived, I had already come to the conclusion that I needed a better monitor so I researched hundreds of monitors and chose the best monitor in my budget. Well really, it was the only monitor in my budget which meets my standards!
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| I ordered a new 'Professional' monitor... higher resolution, wider gamut of color, pre-calibrated to match prints. |
My local Best Buy offered the same price, but I would have to wait 5-10 days for it to arrive at my local store then I would have to go pick it up. So, let's see... I could wait up to 10 days for my order to arrive at Best Buy, then take an hour or more out of my day (and energy... a very important factor considering my health) to go pick it up... or, I could just order from Amazon in the comfort of my home and have my order delivered to my door the day after tomorrow... hmmm... which is more desirable? This required no modicum of intelligence nor decision-making ability whatsoever. Amazon is the way to go. I don't know how they do it so much better than everyone else, but they do.
This new monitor should eliminate all of my problems for a few reasons (well, the problems related to this article). First, it allows viewing at all angles without a loss in brightness nor does viewing angle cause odd color shifts. Next, it shows a wider gamut of color which will match the standard printer profile. Additionally, because I do enjoy desktop publishing, this monitor easily swings up into the portrait orientation making it very easy to view entire documents on the screen.
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| This new monitor easily swings up into a portrait orientation... good for desktop publishing allowing me to view entire pages, and good for viewing portrait orientation photos. |
The good news is that this new monitor should be arriving tomorrow. The bad news is that every single photo I edited in the past few years is edited wrong because I was using a bad display to gauge how to set my colors, brightness and contrast of these photos.
At least I will have a professional grade monitor now so I can get all future prints right... the first time around!
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