Question Replacing 3 cheap monitors with 2 good ones - Image editing / work / gaming

James Blonde

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Mar 19, 2014
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I'm going to be taking my image editing more seriously, and to that end I'm replacing 3 cheapish monitors (2 x 24" Acer and Samsung, 1 x 27" Asus) and I think I can take this down to 2 (the third monitor was underused and too far away).

I've bought a Dell UP2716D as my primary image editing monitor. It seems to have been the go-to editing monitor on many forums, it's 100% Adobe RGB, seemed a sensible option, and the images look awesome on it. This one is probably a keeper, unless there are any obvious show stoppers.

My second monitor - probably the main display in reality - is probably the more difficult of the 2 to replace. I'd want to use it as a second screen for Lightroom / editing / catalog management, for work (I dial in 3 or 4 days a week) and for gaming (usually strategy / simulation type games, maybe GTA, nothing particularly hardcore).

I am trialling an Acer Predator Z35 (XZ350CU) 35" wide screen monitor. This was probably a mistake on many levels - it's 1080p rather than the 1440p I thought it was, so doesn't match the Dell, I didn't really check the colour space but seems poor, and some of the games I've been playing (Don't laugh - Transport Fever) default to the Dell, so my worry is that actually, the games I'm playing aren't compatible with this resolution so can't handle the monitor (maybe that's me being naive though?) so I think this might be going back (though I'll give it a few days). As an experiment though - hmmm.... I'm quite liking the wide screen! However I've noticed colour accuracy seems to suffer - but maybe that's being overplayed?

I'm likely to be upgrading my system from an unclocked i5 3750K / 32Gb / 1070, to something current (8700K / 9700K / 9900K, 32Gb) but carrying over the 1070 graphics card. This is likely to happen in the next few months - maybe sooner.

So, for my primary image editing monitor, do you think I've made a good, solid choice?

For my main monitor, what would you go for given my kind of competing requirements? Any suggestions??
 

James Blonde

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Mar 19, 2014
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Yep, Acer is definitely going back. Viewing angles are poor, and I can't seem to get it to connect with Display Port - only with HDMI - and I needed the HDMI port on my PC for something else.
 

James Blonde

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Mar 19, 2014
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Yep, I think IPS makes more sense. I didn't think wide viewing angles on that screen were critical, but these just don't seem good - I'm sitting at one end of the screen and the other end is faded - it's doesn't seem that tight an angle. This has a 4ms response time, the IPS panels all seem to have 4ms response times, so I guess that's no worse. I only realised my old main monitor (Asus VE278Q) had a 2ms response time when I took it out - I doubt I'd notice much difference.