It seems that NEC no longer makes monitors.

Chan Tran

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Sharp and NEC formed a joint venture since 2020 for form Sharp NEC Display Solutions. Since then I think they discontinued most of the NEC monitors and the Sharp brand replacements are not as good. I bought a Sharp monitor thinking that my Spectraview II calibration kit would work with it but it doesn't.
 

MTGseattle

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I can't help at all with the color calibration issue.

I've been looking for a decent monitor myself and it looks like the 3 most relevant names in the photo editing realm are Benq, Asus proart series and 1 or 2 models from Dell. like many manufactured goods, there's a chance that some of these come out of the same factory and then get various software tweaks to match the intended branding (Sony and LG flat screen tv's for instance) but I have done zero reading to figure all of that out.
 

koraks

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What exactly is your question? How to make SpectraView work with your new Sharp-brand monitor, or which monitor to purchase that'll suit your color rendering needs?
Do you happen to have access to another profiling tool (ColorMunki, i1Pro etc.)?
 
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Chan Tran

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koraks said:
What exactly is your question? How to make SpectraView work with your new Sharp-brand monitor, or which monitor to purchase that'll suit your color rendering needs?
Do you happen to have access to another profiling tool (ColorMunki, i1Pro etc.)?
Click to expand...

It's not so much a question but rather a rant. I like NEC but they don't make them monitor any more. Their software can't calibrate the Sharp monitor because the Sharp monitor doesn't support hardware calibration. It's funny that it identify the model and serial number of the Sharp monitor but said that model is not supported. I have the i1Pro but I use it with the NEC software so that I can do hardware calibration.
I know that BenQ and Dell do have hardware calibration. I was at Microcenter and the salesperson didn't know if the Dell monitor I was interested at can be hardware calibrated so we called Dell and the Dell support guy didn't know either.
 

chriscrawfordphoto

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NEC discontinued the Spectraview line a couple years ago. I am as disappointed as you are; they were incredibly good and a lot less expensive than the Eizo Coloredge screens. I had to replace my old Spectraview, the fourth one I have owned, last year. I ended up with a Benq; it works well and it was a lot less expensive than either Spectraview or the Eizos.
 

koraks

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Gotcha. Is there some advantage to hardware calibration compared to just making an icc profile for the monitor and tell the OS to use that? All the major OS-es and image processing apps these days are color managed, so functionally, the software approach should be good enough, no?
 

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Chan Tran

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Alan Edward Klein said:
B&H Photo carries Eizo calibratable monitors and sensors.
Click to expand...

Eizo is excellent as I have seen them used in the pre-press area where I used to work but they are out of my price range. I returned the Sharp monitor and bought a discontinued NEC monitor. I hope it gets here tomorrow and see how well that works. Otherwise I thin BenQ is a good choice as Dell people don't know what they are selling.
Software calibration is OK but you have to make some hardware adjustments manually when you do the calibration like brightness and contrast. But when you manipulate the color/level with software you lose the bit depth. If the adjustment is minor it's fine but if it's a lot it an cause banding problem.
 
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Chan Tran

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koraks said:
How do you think 'hardware' calibration works? Think about it - this also constricts the gamut the screen can display. It just happens in a black box.
Click to expand...

If you adjust the color and brightness via gain you do not lose the color depth. The same thing with applying gain to a imaging sensor via ISO vs in post making the image brighter digitally. Doing so you do not really getting more noise but what you lose it the color depth. You're losing the bits. If you have more bits than needed to begin with it's fine
 

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I hope that is not the case. I like their products.
 

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koraks said:
I don't think the gain story for sensors applies to LCD's though. And there'll be a difference between LCD's and OLEDs, of course.
Click to expand...

I owned an NEC spectraview. I vaguely recall what Chan mentions - using the proprietary software allowed access to a hardware LUT calibration. This meant that subsequent software color calibration didn’t have to compensate for wide hardware differences. Sorry I’m a little hazy on it but it mattered and was a major technical selling point for these monitors.

Whether such an approach is still relevant in monitor technology In 2025 I do not know, but it was a real thing 10-15 years ago. I still use my spectraview now occasionally and it’s great but I’m Not doing color critical work on it.
 

koraks

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Yeah, I know it's possible and that it'll reduce the magnitude of the ICC profile adjustments; the question (although I feel it's not all that super relevant) is whether the net result is any different from calibrating the whole thing in software space to begin with. I'm hesitant to accept there's much of a difference because in the end, AFAIK the only way to make greyscales on a pixel (=color for RGB pixels) is to modulate the pixel between on/off rapidly as they don't have a semi-transparent state by definition (the pixels are binary). The modulation bandwidth is ultimately hardware limited and not adjustable within the hardware implementation. That's why I put 'hardware' calibration between quotes because a more apt characterization would be 'firmware' calibration that adjusts a LUT within the monitor's software, but it'll still by necessity have to work within the same total modulation bandwidth.
 

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I’m also an NEC fan and have used Spectraview for years. The NEC engineers even worked with me to issue a software patch for a problem only I seemed to have :-O. Hopefully, my NEC PA311D has many years left in it.
 

Rockaway Studios

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I had a bad week a while back when my olde NEC seemed to no longer be capable of completing its calibration cycle. Scenario was it had been powered off for quite a while due to a move. Once I got it set back up, it would fail about half way through the cycle.

I started shopping for whatever I could use to replace it…probably would have landed on the BenQ…but after about a week, it had regained whatever mojo it needed to calibrate. Hopefully I can get a couple more years out of it whilst saving pennies for the eventual replacement.
 
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Chan Tran

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My new NEC monitor came in last week. Gave me quite a workout. It's a discontinued model the unit I got is brand new but was made in 2021. It didn't calibrate right. It's simply too red. Contacted NEC tech support and they are willing to help but didn't figure out the problem. Finally the problem was found that my graphic card forced to a lower color temperature. It's working good now.
I use it with the an old NEC and the old one doesn't have problem because the calibration software actually send the LUT table to the monitor so it compensate for whatever messed up the GPU trying to do. This new monitor has what they call Spectraview Engine which has a factory calibrated LUT table built in so the calibration software only adjust the white point and the black point. It didn't correct the curves. The built in LUT table can be re-calibrated by pluging the colorimeter right into the monitor USB port. But that doesn't cicumvent the fact that the GPU is sending out a different curves than expected.
 
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