Monitors

Five high-end displays to ensure that your on-screen colours match those in your images

Five of the best photoediting monitors on the market

Choosing the best monitor is important. It’s not just about your own viewing satisfaction. It’s crucial that you get a proper rendition of the detail, colour and contrast in your shots. When editing, you only have what you see on the screen – and if your monitor isn’t up to the job, you can easily end up correcting the monitor’s faults when your photos are perfectly fine.

In this guide we’ve picked some of the best monitors on the market that prioritize resolution, colour accuracy, brightness consistency and contrast to display your work. While you can pick up monitors for a couple of hundred quid, the monitors we’re looking at here are high-end, high-performance models that are designed for precision work.

Key considerations

When it comes to size, you might think that bigger is better, but a 27-inch screen is about as far as we’d go. It’s a good compromise between screen space and a comfortable working distance, but a 24-inch display is fine too.

Conversely, with resolution the more dots the greater detail you’ll be able to see. Cheaper screens tend to max out at Full HD (1920x1080) res. That’s fine in a smaller screen, but at larger sizes (20-inch and above) you’ll start to see the dots. With high-resolution 4K or ‘Retina’ screens, you don’t see the pixels.

Colour gamut refers to the range of colours the monitor can produce, and is usually measured by two industrystandard ‘colour spaces’; the base level standard for all displays and devices is SRGB, which every device will support. In commercial publishing however, where the demands are higher, the larger Adobe RGB colour space is used.

The final major consideration is aspect ratio. Most modern screens have a ‘widescreen’ 16:9 aspect ratio, which corresponds to current video standards and also gives a little space at the side of the screen for tools and palettes.