I’m looking to purchase a monitor for design work (currently only use a laptop). But I’m having a hard hard time figuring out what I need. I see a lot of cheap 1080p monitors but I’m also reading that this isnt good enough and I’ll need at least a 1440p monitor. Is this true or will I be okay with a 1080p monitor if it’s only a 24 inch? I want to be sure I’m getting good color accuracy but don’t want to spend more than $200. I’ve used a spyder calibration tool at work and I’m sure I could bring it home to use if needed.
But I know for a fact that some of the new LED monitors suck at low resolution compared to the older LCD monitors when it comes to blending colors through gradients. If you are going to get an LED monitor, your better off going with 4K for a little extra money.
This forum get lots of requests for advice on monitors and desktop printers, but there’s one big problem with these questions. Very few people here have much experience in using anything other than their own monitors and printers.
Maybe they have different setups at home as opposed to work, but there’s hardly any graphic designers in the world who can objectively state which monitors are better than the next since they’ve never run systematic comparisons between all the dozens of competitors.
This is the kind of thing that Consumer Reports does — buy a couple dozen comparable monitors, printers or whatever, sit them side-by-side and run tests. There are also websites that claim to do the same thing, but I often question their expertise and/or any ulterior motives.
It’s a crap shoot, but one thing I can say with reasonable certainty is that the sub-$200 category of monitors might be good for normal business, school and office uses, but for detailed graphic design and color work, um, I’m not too sure they exist. I might be the exception who wastes more money than necessary, but I’ve never paid under $1,000 for a monitor.