UKC

It's upgrade time for my home desktop PC and monitor. The main use I want to cater for is my wife editing photos using Photoshop. Other than that, it's normal use.I don't game or use it to watch movies. My current monitor is a 10 year old LCD with DVI connector.

Can somebody please tell me what particular features I should look for in my new monitor?

Will HD or 4K make a difference if I'm not watching movies?

Will a new monitor even make a difference to photo editing?

Do I need to buy a graphic card or can I buy a motherboard with good enough video?

What connection should I aim for? HDMI?

What's the best size? I'm not interested in dual monitors for home.

Thanks in advance for your advice!

In reply to Jimbocz:
What does your wife edit photos for? Just for fun to share online? For printing out at home? For professional reasons?
Depending on how serious she is, getting a monitor with the correct colour gamut can be very important. Here's a link with some info on the topic: http://compreviews.about.com/od/monitors/a/LCDColorGamut.htm

If she gets a monitor with expanded colour gamut, and one that has a good colour temperature (some LCDs use shitty backlights that give a very high colour temperature, if I remember correctly it's better to have a low colour temperature backlight to better match natural light) - then it quite possibly will help her edit photos better.

Regarding 4k. It's not super necessary. The fundamental thing to consider is that the human eye has a mimimum discernable pixel size - the size of the smallest pixels you can see, before they are too small to see individually. In other words if you have a 50" 4k TV, the size of the pixels will be bigger than that of a 22" 4k display (obviously). But less obviously a 22" 1080p LCD might have a pixel size smaller than your 'minimum discernable pizel size', and thus the 'bottleneck' is eyesight rather than the monitor.

I'd definitely buy a graphics card - they're not that expensive, and make your computer a lot quicker by delegating 'manual labour'.

Best size depends on how big the desk is, how far away the user will be, and required pixel density.

I'm not up to date on best connections, so if there's anything better than HDMI I don't know. It's worth reading up about differences between the different versions of HDMI, as there might be things added in later versions that are worth having. From memory most of the changes between HDMI 1.1 and 1.3 were audio stuff so unimportant, but there might be more goodies added since 1.3.

In reply to Jimbocz:

If you're getting a big one, ie. bigger than 1080p (1920x1080) then I think you'll need a graphics card that either supports DisplayLink, Dual-link DVI or HDMI 2.0 to allow the computer to use the resolution.

I've got my PC to send bigger than 1080p down a regular HDMI (ie. not HDMI 2.0) connection before but the refresh rate was pretty low.

Regarding the screen spec for photo editing - Look out for an IPS LCD or IPS LED panel the colour reproduction is a lot better.

In reply to SenzuBean:

Max resolution on HDMI 1.3 is 1080p (1920x1080).

HDMI 1.4 & 2.0 are up to 4k (4096 x 2160).

In reply to SenzuBean: Thanks for all that.

She mainly just does it for keeping her personal photo collection. She'll put some stuff up on Google Photos to share, but nothing professional.

Looking at colour gamut now.

In reply to Jimbocz:

I find my cheapo Acer 24" (1920 x 1080) more than adequate for Photoshop. OK, it's not a Mac (but a mere fraction of the cost, c.£100), though coupled to a Mac laptop.

In reply to Jimbocz:
Many monitors and motherboards now only come with DisplayPort and VGA (analog) in/outs ports - ie no HDMI ports

Go as big as you can - 27 or 30" at 2560 pixels, you won't regret having pictures big on the screen . Dells are always good value vs size, but watch the colour/white balance, would always recommend using a calibration tool.

I'd avoid 2560 resolution on 24" monitors - icons & text are too way small! (I made that mistake my second monitor replacement (a Dell), yes you can adjust a bit for this).

If you can afford it, an NEC Spectraview is a gold standard.

In reply to SenzuBean:


It can be, but unless she is a professional making photos for print output I think it's highly unlikely that it'll be worth the expense. Most people these days view photos on Facebook or similar ( which uses a custom gamut which is a subset of sRGB ) making AdobeRGB or similar capability a complete waste of money. This is a good buy - http://www.trustedreviews.com/viewsonic-vp2770-led-review

In reply to ChrisJD:

Dell U2515H

In reply to Nick Wallis:


That's the monitor I use as my 2nd monitor. I think the native resolution of 2560x1440 is too high for a 25" screen.

In reply to Jimbocz:

I too have a dell 27 inch monitor and think it's fab.

Excellent colour reproduction and has a wide viewing angle.

U2715h

http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-27-inch-monitor/

In reply to Jimbocz:

Thanks again for everyone's input. I'm still unclear about size and resolution. I've got very poor eyesight and prefer the monitor very close and with bigger text sizes. Does that mean that I should like at a 27 or even 25 inch to avoid it being too big and too close? What native resolution should I look for if I like big text?

In reply to Jimbocz:
If your eyes are bad, I'd suggest the following native resolutions

24/25": 1,920 x 1200

27/30": 2,560 x 1600

I'd also avoid 'widescreen' 16:9 form-factor monitors as your 'main' screen as these will not be as 'tall'. e.g 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440.

Have a look at this as well:

https://pcmonitors.info/articles/2560-x-1440-vs-1920-x-1080/

In reply to ChrisJD:
Thanks, I'm going to look at that carefully!

In reply to Jimbocz:

What's you budget for the desktop pc?

We've used Scan-Uk to build a couple of PCs for us and they've been very good work units on 10 hours+ a day.

These are their pro-graphic range, which can be tweaked to your spec. Our you can just spec your own from scratch:

https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/custom/cad-graphics-workstations/form-factors#an...

In reply to ChrisJD:

What size and make would you suggest for a laptop with a 3200 x 1800 screen?

In reply to ChrisJD:

For some, maybe. I think it's great though.

The out-of-the-box performance is fantastic, and for the money I think it's hard to beat. Only slightly more expensive than the 24", and significantly cheaper than the 27".

In reply to John Stainforth:

Depends on what the UHD laptop graphics card support for a second uHD screen.

For the OP, article about living with uHD monitors (as they are still relatively 'new'):

https://pcmonitors.info/articles/the-4k-uhd-3840-x-2160-experience/

To make things usable, (at the moment) getting the scaling to work nicely across all your programs seems a big issue.

In reply to Nick Wallis:

It's the 16:9 ratio I don't like, I got sucked in by the 25", 2560 width and the cost per pixel), but I didn't really appreciate the 1440 screen height compared with 1600. My second 24" 1600x1200 monitor had just given up and it was poor (too fast) research on my part.

In reply to ChrisJD:

Thanks for the tip, but I'm going to buy the components and assemble it myself.

In reply to Jimbocz:
Their specs might give you some pointers then. Their components are really well priced and the assembly doesn't actually add that much to the overall cost...

I built (with the help of a mate) two desktops in the past - found it pretty stressful!

In reply to ChrisJD:

Thanks for the useful link.

In reply to Jimbocz:

I got a 27 inch, 2560 x 1440 IPS monitor some years ago and was surprised how much better it was for editing in photoshop. When I looked at stuff I'd edited before, in this monitor I could easily see flaws that I couldn't see in the old monitor. Mine was the same panel used by the top Apple monitor at the time but different branding and less than half the price.

I think the higher the resolution the better it will be. Colours are definitely better on IPS monitors. The connection doesn't matter really, especially if you're not using it for films. HDMI can carry the audio signal too but not relevant for PS. As long as it's digital (probably all are now) and it fits your mobo or graphics card. LED monitors use less power and are just as good so worth getting.

The onboard motherboard graphics will need to be good enough to cover the resolution of your monitor so you'll need to check that before deciding whether you need a separate graphics card or not. Not sure what specs they are these days, but many onboard graphics only used to only go up to 1920 x 1080, not enough for a decent monitor. Also I believe if you're doing any 3D work in Photoshop getting a separate, better graphics card will help render faster. For non-3D work the processing is all done by the CPU I believe.

For the motherboard make sure you have plenty of RAM. PS files can be large, especially when you have lots of layers and/or start stitching photos together into panoramas etc. I think 8gb would be minimum. I've got 16gb. If you think you might want to upgrade RAM in the future make sure there are four slots with only two in use. That way you won't have to ditch your existing RAM first.

And, to repeat, definitely make sure you get an IPS monitor.

In reply to Jimbocz:

Bit depth is another consideration. The higher the better supposedly but this has to be supported by both the graphics card and the interface (eg DVI, HDMI v1.3, Display Port etc.). My monitor is low in this regard so don't know how much better a higher bit depth is in quality.

In reply to Jimbocz:

I bought an NEC Multisync monitor a couple of years ago, and think it's superb. It's this one - https://www.amazon.co.uk/NEC-Multisync-EA193Mi-19-Inch-Monitor/dp/B00F9RKPA...

I like the non-widescreen format, and the smaller size suits me too. Great quality and crystal clear display.

In reply to Jimbocz:
Thanks to everyone who replied, I got a little something different from everyone's suggestions.

I ended up going with a
Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24" Widescreen LED IPS Monitor Black


http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/monitors/24inchmonitors/210-agyr.html

If anyone is interested, here's my shopping list for the whole build:

http://www.novatech.co.uk/viewwishlist.html?l=8198

Please don't give me a hard time about every single choice, I never said I was an expert at this!