Question A few questions about a new monitor for photography & some fairly light gaming. 10bit or is 8bit + FRC fine, good uniformity and DE, etc

[Darkmatterx76]

Hi I'm trying to decide on a new monitor, which I'll be using for work (photography) and some gaming entertainment. Life doesn't give me nearly as much time to play games as I would like. lol
I'd say my top 3, all of them important qualities are, color accuracy or same after calibration, good contrast, and good screen uniformity.

First, I would love to get a really nice Eizo, but that isn't happening in this economy.

Price range: $2-2.5Kish Canadian.

Need a zero flicker display, so no PWM.

Also, I'm using an i1Display Pro calibrator.



Some of my questions are, true 10bit vs 8bit + FRC. I do work in Photoshop, so, as a color managed display, 10bit would work, but I'm not sure if it's worth it compared to 8 bit + FRC monitors. Thoughts?

If I go ultra-wide for the extra space it would almost definitely be a resolution height of 1440p. One of my concerns is that very few companies that make good monitors (Eizo, NEC who else?) have a large selection of ultra-wide angle monitors, and they're curved. For non-curved, there isn't as many options and I have some concerns about viewing angles at the left and right edge.

Which leads me to my next question. Curved. It scares me. lol I do a lot of landscape, and the idea of a curved monitor makes me nervous. I'm not sure if it would mess with me trying to level the horizon on a curved panel.

4K vs 2K (1440p)? I've seen a 4K at 32" and at 100% Windows DPI, I would have needed 20/10 vision to use it. At 1440p, a 27" seems perfect at 100% DPI, and DPI scaling issues are a PITA, but I've heard 27" 4K monitors are amazing due to the size of the pixels. /shrug

Are VA panels within a DE (once calibrated) that would be unnoticeable these days, or is IPS still better enough to see the difference? I'd be going wide gamut. Also, it's really just for me working, so I won't have a lot of people looking over my shoulder, or sitting next to me where angle matters as much. That said, if their contrast drops through the floor once calibrated, there's no point.


Hardware calibration is awesome for some things, but as long as it has lots of OSD options, I should be OK. I generally use DisplayCal anyways. That's partly why I want good uniformity out of the box.


Thanks!

Let me know if you want some other details.


DM

 

[_Rick_]

Dell UltraSharp U4021QW if you can wait for them to become widely available and make the fit into your budget. And if you are okay with the size. There will also be a Thinkvision following with the same panel, but slightly higher refresh rate.
It combines the best of UHD with the best of ultrawide, at a size that finally matches the height of the 30" 2560x1600 displays.
It looks like a great panel, but I'm still waiting for reviews to look into uniformity, which can get spotty with larger displays.
It's not yet clear, if the panel does FRC or has 10 native states - but a well done FRC at sufficient oversampling over the display's refresh rate is probably good enough.

So purely from stats, this is probably a suitable screen, but without any reviews out yet, I'm not going to give it a full recommendation.

Regarding DPI: most of the issues are due to having different scaling on different screens - having one of these makes a second screen less of a necessity, over say a 32" 4K screen. So those DPI-scaling issues are much less of a challenge.