After asking around on twitter, doing a day of research on Google and YouTube and mainly reading TFT Central and some forum posts, I have finally bought myself a new display for graphic design and web design work.
Meet the NEC MultiSync EA232WMi. You can read the full review on TFT Central, but here are some of the key reasons I have chosen to go with NEC in stead of the more “classical” choices such as Dell, Samsung or Apple:
- 23 inch is just the perfect size for me. The bigger 27 inch screens always seem so overwhelming to me. I work with them at school and I think they are just too damned big.
- The display is based on an e-IPS panel, which is a panel that has very interesting characteristics when mainly working with 2D still images. The most important one is the wide viewing angle and resulting colour/contrast consistency.
- As much as I like the characteristics of CCFL backlighting, it does have a slower warm-up time and it contains Mercury, which is not exactly environmentally-friendly. The power consumption of LED backlighting is also less than that of CCFL backlighting, which is definitely a positive thing.
- The display has the best panel uniformity I could find in this price category, which is important when working with still images. I‘m not that big of a colour-calibration freak, but I do believe it is important that a solid colour looks the same in every corner of your screen when designing.
- There are four extra USB ports on this display, which makes it perfect to plug in my printer, one backup disk and a Unifying receiver.
- I can connect the display via DVI, VGA or DisplayPort. More than enough for me. I have it connected via DVI for now. Perfect!
- Very important: all of the necessary cables are provided with the display! I cannot stress this enough. NEC delivers a VGA, DVI, USB, Audio Mini-Jack and power cable. For the first time in my life, I did not have to go through the disappointment of having to go to the local electronics shop to buy the right cables. Bliss!
- On the downside, the display has a slower response time (14ms), but since I am not that big of a gamer, I could not really be bothered by that. You always have to make a compromise of some sort when you are on a budget and in my case, I decided very quickly that a fast response time is not important to me. A not so fast response time is also very relative, movies still look awesome on this display. I don’t notice any motion blur at all. But I can imagine that this might be different for frequent gamers or motion picture editors.
- At €324,36 it fit perfectly within my budget.