How we test (and how to set up) pro screens

A detailed guide to the steps and hardware involved in calibrating displays for professional use.

For most consumer-oriented monitors, subjective observations can provide enough information to make at least a rough assessment about the look, feel and general user experience of a given PC monitor. Products pitched at professional use are a slightly different kettle of fish, however, and purchase decisions are often made with a specific target in mind, with specs and features that need to hit specific goals in order to deliver the desired outcome for the user’s chosen occupation.

PRO SETUP

As such, to deliver the kind of objective information desired by the professional market, to calibrate displays for this feature, we used an i1Display Pro colourimeter developed by X-Rite, one of the two leaders in the professional colour calibration market — the other being Datacolor. The i1Display Pro is an upper-tier, professional model of colourimeter from X-Rite and inline with the Spyder 5 Elite by Datacolor. These devices are typically used by professionals to combat colour drift and colour misrepresentation, among many other elements of concern in expert colour management.

For pros or semi-pros looking for an economic option that lacks some of the more advanced, deeper, versatile settings, but still calibrates your display effectively for accurate colour, check out the ColorMunki Display by X-Rite along with the Spyder 5 Express and Spyder 5 Pro by Datacolor. These are still very capable colourimeters and will help to ensure your colours stay consistent throughout your workflow and digital workspace.

HOW COLOURIMETERS WORK

If you haven’t heard of the i1Display Pro before, just what is it? It is a nifty little optical measurement device that fits with ease into the palm of your hand and is lightweight. The unit slings over your monitor with optics facing the display panel to measure the panel and has a few party tricks to get your display calibrated, just right. Paired with a software suite from X-Rite called i1Display Profiler, the i1Display Pro measures the display image outputs while you adjust settings in the display OSD such as brightness, contrast and RGB values, among others, to calibrate your display as close as possible to ‘true’ colour replication.

GETTING SET UP

The i1Display Pro was connected to a host system via USB. In this case, the test bench is based on the new Intel Core i7-7700K with a Gigabyte Aorus Z270X-Gaming 7 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition. The displays were connected via a DisplayPort connection and the displays set to receive a DisplayPort v1.2 signal to ensure sufficient bandwidth for the high resolution and high bit-depth displays to be tested.

Displays were factory reset upon setup and the colour profile set to user defined. Many of the displays feature a range of pre-set profiles, typically including sRGB and for some Adobe RGB, too. We ensured every bit of colour performance from the display unit was used throughout the benchmarking suite. This was achieved with a combination of using a hardware calibration device, setting a user defined colour profile on the display’s OSD, and pairing both elements with the operating system colour profile generated through the i1Display Profiler software (ICM or ICC file depending on your system).

The benchmark suite checked numerous technical facets, which included luminance, contrast ratio, colour gamut, colour accuracy delta, panel uniformity and black levels.

This technical approach to monitor assessment ensures a thoroughly objective view of the performance delivered by the displays in the review roundup. Paired with the subjective user experience also assessed during the review process, the monitors were thoroughly put to the test.