Wednesday, December 17, 2008

tft monitors bleach out art pictures, especially paintings

a short post today about thin film transistor liquid crystal display monitors (tft monitors).

the thing is, almost everywhere i go, i see this type of flat screen monitor being used. but when i view my artist's site on such a tft monitor, it all looks awry. the colours and lighting of especially paintings and drawings are horribly distorted, making many works seem as if they are simply bleached out by having been in the ocean for extended period of time.

i tried to see if other pictures of artworks suffer similarly, and yes they do. it really hurts my eyes to look at pictures of paintings on these monitors. (sculptures generally come out ok, normal photographs also are acceptable.)

yet noone seems to be complaining. i remember returning a brand new tft monitor of a well-known quality brand a few years ago (i couldn't stand the way it rendered the colours of my own paintings) and that the salesperson told me that yes, colour was known to be an issue, but i was the first one to complain. i had to say that i'm a visual artist, which convinced them to take it back and refund me.

my dilemma is now becoming acute. should i buy such a tft monitor and try to limit the damage by spending enormous amount of time to readjust my art photographs? or should i just stay with my old iiyama vision master, in the knowledge that the majority of people looking at my sites will get to see something horribly different from what i see (which are usually strong, well-lighted colours).

i cannot express how stupid i find this type of problem. one does one's best to create faithful pictures (this is hard work, because photographing paintings and drawings is not easy), and then supposedly better technology comes along, and all the hard work is for nothing. simply because to most people, faithful colour representation of art works is not so important.

oh well. there goes the neighborhood. sorry to grump on you. please, if you visit my site, try to do so on a crt monitor or something comparable in colour /lighting quality.

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