I just got one of the first Eizo CG210 monitors and will be using it for at least a year as my main retouching monitor. It comes in a box that says Color Management LCD Monitor, which means it's supposed to be color-accurate. I'll describe my first impressions on unpacking below, and maybe do the real review in a couple of months.
The Eizo CG210 is a color-reference monitor with an sRGB gamut, usable for soft-proofing. Eizo also has a new-generation device, the CG220, which has an incredible gamut that encompasses the whole Adobe RGB color space. These two are probably the best color-accurate LCDs available today (although an NEC device with LED backlighting and an aRGB gamut is supposed to hit the market soon).
In a sense, it's quite absurd to attempt a color-performance review of the CG210 here; it's the state of the art. The gamut is sRGB; there is little banding and excellent uniformity. What is more interesting are the practical usability issues incurred by adding the Eizo to my setup.
As for my rationale for adding this unit, my previous monitor, a Samsung 213T, has exactly the same size (21 inches), which I decided was the right size. However, as a photographer and sometimes color consultant, I want good color. As a writer who spends long hours at the screen, I need something really pleasant to look at.
My decision to go with the CG210 was based on two factors: price—the CG220 is listed at $6,000 and the CG210 costs about half as much; and continuity. The CG210 is the successor to Eizo's CG21, which is well-considered by the color community and should by now have all the bugs worked out. I am always a bit frightened of the new-new thing. Eizo's five-year warranty made the decision easier.
You can get the CG210 in just two frame colors, gray and black. Current fashion is gray as it's said to minimize the contrast jump your eyes endure when moving from outside the screen to the image. The monitors I see at photo shows are mostly gray. Mine happens to be black, which I was secretly hoping for but didn't specify and in practice I like that just fine. Liking your monitor is psychologically important as you tend to see a lot of it.
(So far, the packing has been the first and only serious problem I've had. The box comes with a drawing indicating one should lift the monitor out of the box. I couldn't get a decent grip, and the thing was too heavy to lift when bending. I strained my back. I'm average-sized for a guy in Europe. I think petite women would not enjoy lifting the CG210 out of its box. In the end I cut the box open at the bottom.)
The result of unpacking the Eizo and connecting it to my G5 PowerMac is that I now have a dual-monitor setup. There was a minor cabling issue as the Mac video card has one obsolete Apple-specific ADC connector in addition to the standard DVI port. Luckily I happened to have the right adapter lying around. If you want a dual-monitor setup and have a standard-issue PowerMac you may need to order an ADC computer to DVI screen adapter: They're just two plugs and a wire, so they remain fairly cheap.
Now, both my screens swivel physically, but we'll see if the Eizo can do this better. This is one of the innovative features in the Eizo CG210, which improves over the CG21, its predecessor: It has a built-in chip that handles the screen swiveling, and a sensor that knows whether it is positioned in landscape or portrait orientation.
To rotate the screen while using it, you just grab it and turn. There are a few blinks, and then the system updates everything automatically. The hardware swiveling worked very well on my Mac with Panther. I have the menus on the Eizo, with its desktop as my rightmost screen. The software got lost once, transferring the menus to the other screen, but after I used preferences to switch the menus back to the Eizo in landscape mode, it worked perfectly on subsequent rotations.
By contrast, even though Apple's new Tiger has screen rotation built into the ATI video drivers, switching the orientation requires a few mouse clicks, while just grabbing the Eizo screen and twisting is obviously much faster, and more intuitive. Lastly, there is a cable channel built into the stem at the rear of the Eizo that brings the wires up from the foot of the display to a point near the pivot. The cable channel prevents the cables from dragging, or worse, snagging when you turn the screen on its side. Nice design!
At the bottom of the display's frame, there is a row of eight buttons. The legends engraved on my black ones were unreadable in normal light. The buttons control the monitor's functionality, and are presumably very useful when running with a legacy analog card, but you won't be doing much adjusting if you're running the display in digital mode. This is as it should be, as people who buy this unit will mostly want to set up for their favorite calibration and forget about adjustment. Eizo monitors are very good with regard to calibration.
Click here to read Edmund Ronald's column on color management.
The monitor comes hardwired for displaying the sRGB gamut at 6,500K at a gamma of 2.2. This mode is directly selectable by one of the front buttons. The banding of a Photoshop black-to-white gradient, with default factory settings, was decent but not extraordinary, while gray neutrality was perfect. So I dug out my Gretag Eye-One spectro device and prepared to recalibrate. This is not the Eye-One Display colorimeter recommended by Eizo and sold as an accessory under its own brand but the more expensive spectrophotometer. I then grabbed the install CD.
On the install CD I found the display's complete user guide. I glanced at it, and although it details the functionality of the buttons I couldn't make much sense of them: I guess I've gone stupid with age. However, the CD also included Eizo's Color Navigator software. The CD version did not yet seem to run on Tiger, but the Version 3.0.3 that I downloaded from Eizo's site worked flawlessly. (Actually, now that I think of it, Tiger is creating a lot of small nuisances in my life because the rest of the world hasn't yet adapted to it. While it's interesting to test it, I'm not quite sure that everybody should move to Tiger for production, yet.)
If I understand rightly, Color Navigator does two things: It allows you to calibrate the display and to profile it. The hard work of displaying colors on the CG210 is done by a 14-bit conversion table that is wired into the display by the factory, which performs an individual measurement of the unit. Color Navigator just measures the output a bit and then tweaks the internal circuitry so that the display looks to the external computer like a monitor with an sRGB gamut and whatever gamma you choose; all the non-linearities inherent in LCDs are smoothed out internally by Eizo's custom circuitry.
To confirm this hypothesis, I had a look at the "vcgt" curves written into the profile file by Color Navigator. For the CG210 they were all identically linear, while for my Samsung profiled with Basiccolor they were full of squiggles. However, the real proof of a pudding is in the eating, and you will probably want to know how the monitor looks to my own lying eyes.
The Eizo monitor didn't do better than the Samsung on my eyeball ColorChecker tests: one synthetic Photoshop chart window on the Eizo, one on the Samsung, and a real one in my hands. In fact, I was unhappy enough with the red patch that I measured my own Macbeth chart to check the Lab values against those in my synthetic chart.
Both screens didn't quite make it, but I'd say the Eizo came off worse in the difficult red patch, and the Samsung in the dark blue. Of course these are tiny differences. A friend of mine brought a different set of eyeballs to the test, and called the Samsung the flat-out winner in the Macbeth challenge, while I consider its neutrality to favor the Eizo decisively: a hung jury.
The gray patches certainly did look better to me on the Eizo. And on Photoshop gradients, the Eizo beat the Samsung handily. It's much smoother, showing much less banding and perfect neutrality. The Samsung, even calibrated with ColorEyes or Basiccolor (see below), displayed some banding, but also color crossovers in the dark tones with magentas alternating with greens. There were no color crossovers on the Eizo.
Next Page: The difference is in the details.
When I loaded in some real-world images the comparison turned to the Eizo's advantage: Shadow detail that was totally blacked out on the Samsung appeared on the Eizo. In one photo I took of an orangutan, the details of the eyes of the ape immediately jumped out on the Eizo, where they'd been drowned in the dark on the Samsung.
In a bird shot, dark feather detail suddenly became visible. However, when reprofiled, the Samsung gained back some of the lost shadows. In the end, the difference in shadow tones and skin texture was still a win for the Eizo. Skin highlights also displayed markedly better, with a luminosity on skin that I find delightful, speaking as a fashion photographer. However I doubt that anyone short of a professional photographer, prepress professional or printer would find this significant.
The Samsung was profiled using the ColorEyes Display software from the folks at Integrated-Color Corp., and with an old version of Basiccolor Display. These are some of the best software tools for profiling displays, albeit not very well-known; they are related but not identical and share some of the same programming.
Click here to read Edmund Ronald's column about equipping yourself for successful photography.
Jack Bingham at ICC told me that he will very soon be releasing a new tool that can talk to the Eizo CG210; however, this novel version wasn't ready at press time, so I used the current version on the Samsung, but not on the Eizo. Similarly, Eizo's Color Navigator only works on Eizo displays, so it couldn't be employed on the Samsung. Multiple monitor setups are hard, even though Apple's systems handle them well.
I'm a perfectionist: On balance, I am still a tiny bit unhappy with both the monitors; the reds of the Macbeth chart never displayed perfectly. This may be due to my measuring with a spectrophotometer rather than a colorimeter, but there's something weird going on here. I will request some hardware on loan and try the profiling game again, maybe pitting Optix against ColorEyes, when ICC sends me its new version of ColorEyes Display. For now, I'll enjoy the productivity of my dual screens, which are amazingly well-matched seeing that they had to be profiled with different packages.
Well, I certainly expended a lot of effort bringing up my dual-screen setup. After my first day staring at the Eizo, I must say I find it pleasant to look at. I've also discovered how much productivity you gain on a vertical dual monitor setup, because you always have one monitor available for the inevitable mail and browser windows. Also you need to scroll down much less. Text pages are definitely made to be displayed elongated. I also found that the hood supplied with the Eizo really helps; every graphic artist should consider getting a hood or improvising one.
A reviewer is a difficult critic, so I do have some suggestions: Eizo should improve the packing material (see above): My back still hurts. They should bundle calibrator hardware—or else performance may suffer because of the user's choice.
Also, Eizo's software should support both the Eizo and another screen and match them: Dual screens are a nightmare if the software doesn't support both.
If they market the CG210 for dual-screen systems on Macs, they might throw an ADC adapter into the package; users will need this part. They might also add a couple more USB ports to the integrated hub in the back of the display, as two ports are not really enough for a keyboard, and a mouse, and a calibrator. Minor improvements and better software are all the Eizo CG210 needs: It's well-nigh perfect as an sRGB device, apart from the price.
And the Samsung 213T? Well, given the fact that the 213T is traded cheaply and has no pretensions as a color-management monitor, it made a decent showing when pitted against this expensive and specialized contender. Of course, I don't know how much of the unexpectedly good showing of the Samsung is due to the software I used. But then, isn't a good fighter a product of his coaching? Anyway, today's Eizo vs. Samsung match goes to the CG210, a win on points but not an easy knockout. The Winnaaaaahhhhhhh!
Edmund Ronald has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, but he is currently on a sabbatical as a photographer in Paris.
