Yes, I know. This blog is turning into me rambling about monitors. Or maybe it always was. I dunno.
Anyways, I returned the Hp 2475w because of the green/pink tints. I bought it through CDW since a sales rep that told me that they had a 30-day refund policy, but I found out through all this that HP products are excepted. So I had a fun time trying to talk to HP customer support (I later read on HardForum that one should call the Business support line, since this is a business product. If you call the consumer line, they don’t even list a category for monitors).
Long story short, the CDW rep eventually set up an RMA for me so that was that.
And today, I finally ordered the 2490. This is silly, I’ve been working up to this for how long now? Like 9 months? And the thing hasn’t gotten any cheaper either.
So the theory is that the 2490 appears to be the last of the good sRGB monitors. Maybe wide gamut is the future, but it’s not an overstatement to say that the rest of the industry hasn’t figured out how to deal with it yet. And by the rest of the industry, I really mean Windows and it’s ecosystem. Yes, there are some expensive color-managed apps out there that work today. Yes, there are a very small number of video cards that can do 10-bit color, over display port. Yes, Vista makes things a little better (except for the whole UAC blowing away your gamma LUT thing). But what I really mean by “figured out” is having all apps work the way they were intended, including non-color-managed ones. I’m not sure exactly how that would work, but you’d think with graphics cards being so powerful, something can be done. Maybe the future is Microsoft’s scRGB and 10 or 16bits per channel over some nextgen interface. I’ve been around long enough to know that that ain’t going to be pervasive for at least another 5 years, and in the meanwhile, the 2490 will do just fine.
I’m also liable (unfortunately) to be hooking up a Linux box to my monitors for many years to come, so going with an sRGB monitor is still the safest bet. Whatever solution the Windows people come up with, it’ll probably land on the Linux side another 2-3 years later. The 2490’s hardware calibration means in theory I can even have correct colors under Linux today. Surely, that’s worth something.
And in a final bout of self-justification, I realized that when I purchased my Planar PL201M 5-6 years ago, it cost $900 or so. If I were willing to spend that much then, this 2490 is actually cheaper to me after inflation.
Anyways, hopefully finally, I can put this whole thing to rest now, at least for another few years. It’s about time.