New Display Technology: LaCie 700 series
October 18, 2008
Written by Rob Griffith
One of the nicer things about my job is getting my hands on the latest kit. When the LaCie 730 came into the office I was eager to see it because it uses a new display technology designed to give a broader colour gamut.
Most LCD screens have a backlight that is basically a fluorescent tube, it’s a bit more than that really but it’s a white light source that is then turned into colour pixels by the LCD matrix. The LaCie 700 series doesn’t use a white light it uses red, green and blue LEDs. So you get a red light source for the red pixels, green for green and blue for blue. This makes deeper and richer colours possible, extending the colour gamut of the display.
[Click the gamut image to see a larger version]
I had already seen one screen, the HP Dreamcolor LP2480zx, that uses RGB LED technology but that screen is aimed mostly at the motion picture market whereas the LaCie is aimed at photographers and pre-press.
Out of the box the 730 is a classy looking monitor with a nice simple design. Once you hook it up computer (one that can handle the 2560 x 1600 resolution) it becomes truly impressive. 30 inch screens always look good, although for my money I think 24 inch is the ideal size to have on a desk, but in the past I have usually found some flaw on closer inspection. It is very hard to get a conventional 30 inch display with one light source uniform across such a large area, by having many individual light sources and some clever electronics LED backlit screens can avoid this pitfall.
I installed the bundled BlueEye Pro PE calibration software and used an Eye-One Display 2 to calibrate the screen. The BlueEye software is very easy to use and communicates directly with the monitor to make any adjustments. Once calibrated the display looked even better. Using my test images in Photoshop I couldn’t really find fault with it.
A new feature in this version of BlueEye Pro PE is the inclusion of the UDACT test for post calibration certification. The Ugra Display Analysis and Certification Tool was developed by Ugra – The Swiss Centre of Competence for Media and Printing Technology for testing the suitability of monitors for soft proofing various press standards and colour spaces. The test checks the ability of the monitor to display accurately colour spaces such as ISO coated, and Adobe RGB (1998). The 730 passed the test without any problems and had a gamut that exceeded or equalled all the colour spaces in the test. The test also checks for uniformity, a vital check for any large screen.
[Click to download the Ugra report we generated on the LaCie 730 - 25kb PDF]
The 730 and it’s smaller 724 and 720 brethren would be ideal monitors for any professional photographer or pre-press retoucher. I’ve long been a fan of EIZO monitors but I think LaCie have made a bold move getting such advanced technology to market first.
You can find out more about the LaCie 700 series monitors and buy them online at Native Digital.
Rob
