NEC 30" LCD 3090WQXi color gamut
I’ve set up my new NEC 30" LCD 3090WQXi. I like everything about it except a low hum it makes, very irritating since I asked about this explicitly before purchase back in January at MacWorld Expo. I’ll see what NEC has to say about it.
I got my display with the bundled calibrator, on the theory that any random calibrator is not the best idea. I got my 3090WQXi with or without the calibrator from OWC (also available from B&H Photo).
Check out the color gamut on this thing. I’ve already noticed a startling improvement in the rendition of reds compared to the Apple 30" Cinema Display, where the NEC can display well beyond AdobeRGB, very useful with the Nikon D3x, which seems to have quite a wide gamut. In fact, the reds now have so much better display that at first I thought I had not calibrated properly—it‘s that startling a difference! The NEC can’t quite show some intense greens in AdobeRGB but it’s almost there, a very impressive performance.
The images shown below are in ProPhotoRGB color space; they’ll look totally wrong (washed out) in a non-color aware browser, and even Safari and Firefox do not display them correctly (they look very “hot”). That is a puzzle—a bug in those browsers which are supposed to display correctly with other color spaces. I recently discovered another color display bug in Safari for JPEG files, so this comes as no big surprise.
Open them in Photoshop and you can see them correctly insofar as a JPEG can provide. Make sure your Photoshop settings preserve ProPhotoRGB as the working space).
Color gamut of NEC LCD 3090WQXi
(yellow triangle delimits the AdobeRGB color space)
Now compare the pathetic color gamut of sRGB below (blue triangle). Huge chunks of green and red go missing in sRGB, a problem I’ve seen increasingly with the Nikon D3x.
Color gamut of NEC LCD 3090WQXi
(blue triangle delimits the sRGB color space)
