Customer Reviews

NEC Computers LCD2490WUXI-BK 24-Inch Widescreeen LCD Monitor

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Nec Computers 24-Inch LCD Monitor (LCD2490WUXI-BK)
A month ago my Dell CRT monitor died. I decided to replace it with an LCD monitor, but since I like to putter around in Photoshop I needed one with excellent color fidelity, resolution and convergence. After some investigation I decided on the NEC LCD2490, and ordered from Amazon. It arrived promptly.
A careful examination showed that all pixels were present and functioning. I don't have a colorimeter, but testing with Displaymate indicated that the colors appeared to be accurate, convergence was excellent all over the screen, as was the ability to distinguish small contrast changes. Best of all, the pictures I had recently taken with my Canon EOS 40D were breathtaking in their detail, color, vividness and immediacy; very much better than they had appeared on the old CRT.
The size is just right for editing two side-by-side document pages in Microsoft Word; very useful. The only caveat is that the screen is a little brighter than I would like, even though I have set the brightness to 0. Overall I am more than satisfied.

If you are not a pro photographer or graphic designer, you really don't need this monitor. If you are, it is a good choice. I had to sell a piece of my soul to buy it, but it was worth it to me. For another $200 or so, you can get the NEC Spectraview software and a monitor calibration puck for critical work.

I originally bought a Samsung Syncmaster 245T thinking that I could save some bucks but I had to send it back since it was just too far off colour-wise, even with hardware calibration. I received this today and it's perfect - dead-on, natural colour, even without having calibrated yet and no input lag. This is the absolute minimum you can spend for professional imaging in my opinion.

The search is over! For years I was struggling to find an acceptable monitor for photo editing. For years I used an Apple Cinema Display with my Gen 1 MacBook Pro. I calibrated with the GreTag-MacBeth Eye-One and had good results, but my laptop monitor and the ACD color never totally matched. I then got a MacPro with dual Dell ULTRASHARP 2408WFP displays. I picked these because of the brightness statistics, refresh rate, multiple inputs, PIP, and supposedly great color. Big mistake. I could never get them calibrated, even with the $1500 Eye-One spectrophotometer. I sold these at a 50% loss and purchased the NEC. While the NEC costs over twice as much as the Dells and has very limited inputs and worse "statistics", the color and image quality can not be compared. Finally, I have color neutral B&W images and color images that match my prints perfectly. Calibration was a snap, and this monitor now also matches my calibrated ACD. The NEC was worth every penny.

This is the monitor that finally convinced me to give up CRTs.

I am not a pro, but I'm pretty serious about my photography. Up to this point, any LCD that would do the job for both color and B&W was priced too far out of my range. This monitor hit the sweet spot for price and performance.

There have been comments that out of the box, this monitor is just too darn bright...And they're right. You do need to turn down the brightness. But if you're going to be a serious user (and why would you spend over $1,000 if you weren't?) the real solution is to calibrate it.

NEC's full calibration kit (software and puck) costs around $300. However, if you already have a puck from another calibration application, it may be compatible with the SV2 software -- which only costs $100.

As of this review, compatible pucks are: GretagMacbeth Eye-One Display V1, X-Rite/GretagMacbeth Eye-One Display V2, X-Rite/GretagMacbeth Eye-One Monitor, Eye-One Pro, X-Rite ColorMunki, Monaco OptixXR (X-Rite DTP 94), ColorVision/Datacolor Spyder 2, and Datacolor Spyder 3. That saved me $200 -- and besides, it seemed like the full kit (software and puck) was out of stock everywhere.

The SV2 software is better anyway, since it deals with the monitor directly. Also, it is dead simple. Select the right profile area from the on-screen menu, and let 'er rip. There are a number of pre-set profiles for different uses, and the photo one seems just fine -- and also deals with the brightness. (I tried my Pantone software with a Spyder 2 puck -- it was a hassle, and after an hour of fiddling around, I realized that I was wasting my time. I got the SV2 software directly from NEC, plugged in my puck, and was good to go. You do need to manually install the drivers for the other pucks, but that takes just a few minutes.)

Go ahead and get the hood too. It snaps right on (though you'll probably need to read the directions) and has a little hatch in the middle so you can place your calibration puck without taking off the hood.

The bottom line is that this is a sweet monitor, and if you calibrate it properly with the SV2 software, it is even sweeter.

P.S. One downside is that I will probably need to by a cheapo, lower resolution LCD monitor just to see how some output (photos and especially web pages) look on the monitors most people use. Luckily most decent video cards have dual outputs.

I bought this monitor to replace my aged NEC-Mitsubishi 2070SB for amateur photo editing. It is absolutely spectacular with accurate color and wide viewing angles, and printed output closely matches screen images. While I was leery about abandoning my CRT for an LCD my fears were totally unfounded; this fine monitor is an upgrade over the CRT! I already own a LaCie Blue Eye Pro calibrator and it works perfectly with this monitor and NEC's SpectraView II software (purchased separately through NEC). You can store calibration data for different conditions and recall these monitor settings via software without having to re-calibrate every time or manually adjust the monitor. Very convenient.
Since this monitor lives at home it will see some gaming from time to time. My teenage son reports no major problem with input lag, ghosting or smearing of images.

This is an IPS panel, standard gamut monitor. Many people on the internet say it is the best monitor available right now, since it has an A-TW polarizer (which eliminates the white glow at an angle that other IPS monitors without the A-TW polarizer suffer from) and it does not suffer from oversaturation that wide gamut monitors suffer from.

This monitor has an advanced menu that lets you customize a lot of things. You can do full, aspect, and 1:1 scaling, as well as custom scaling, and have a different scaling setting for each resolution. You can also customize the shade of gray of the black bars around the scaled image.

But for the money, I must say I am a bit disappointed. I made a black image and made it fullscreen, and I saw backlight bleed on parts of the left side. Other people have reported the same problem. I also saw that the lower left corner had a purple tint, and the lower right corner had a green tint. People say that is normal for monitors with the A-TW polarizer. I understand that there is no LCD monitor that is perfect, but I was expecting this monitor to be closer to perfect for such a high price. If this monitor is the best available right now, then it's scary to think about the kinds of problems other monitors have.

I bought this NEC monitor specifically for editing digital photographs in Adobe Photoshop. A larger model was recommended in a Photoshop book I bought - Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers by Martin Evening (also available from Amazon). For my purposes, it works extremely well.

There were two reasons for buying this monitor:
1. With my old Sony LCD and Canon photo printer, I was having an extremely difficult time matching the colors between what you see on the display to what was being printed on the printer. They were not close, even though I was using a color calibrator on the display. This cost me a lot of time and money making and throwing away multiple prints because the color did not come out correctly. With this NEC LCD and an Epson R2880 printer, the colors are perfectly matched as far as I can tell. I set the monitor to sRGB and calibrated it. After calibration, there was only a slight shift in the color compared to the default settings.

2. The widescreen format gives me enough working room on the display to comfortably edit photographs. With my old 19" 4:3 ratio LCD, I had control windows overlapping the photos being edited. With the NEC LCD, the photo is on the left and the control windows are on the right. For some tasks such as sharpening, it is recommended that you be at 100% view to see the impact of your changes.

A couple of other nice benefits are that I can see more columns on Excel spreadsheets (reducing the need to slide back and forth) and I can see two-up pages in Word. It just makes things a little bit easier.

The bottom line is that some of these benefits would be achieved from most widescreen LCDs so the differentiator has to be the NEC's color accuracy - it's fabulous. However, it is only needed if you are editing photographs or doing other graphical design work.

One last comment - the monitor is very bright - some people might not like that.

I bought this monitor from Amazon along with the Eye One Display 2 colorimeter. I also bought the NEC SpectraView II calibration and profiling software directly from the NEC website. After calibrating and profiling the monitor which is easy, automatic and quick with the NEC SpectraView II software, this monitor was not too bright but just perfect. I highly recommend this monitor if you want to work in the sRGB color gamut, which you probably do if want to view images on the Internet. I do photo editing with Photoshop and this monitor is great for that purpose. I considered wide gamut monitors also which can display the wider Adobe RGB 1998 color gamut, but reviews I read of the wide gamut monitors indicated that even if you try to calibrate them for sRGB for Internet image viewing the blues and greens will look exaggerated. Advice I received from an expert was to get an sRGB monitor like this NEC LCD2490WUXI-BK 24 inch if you want to work in the sRGB color gamut for image display on the Internet and printing with an sRGB pirnter and only get the wide gamut monitor if you will work only in Adobe RGB 1998 color gamut where you print to a high end printer that can print the Adobe RGB color gamut and where you will not be concerned with displaying images on the Internet.

I'm yet again very pleased with Amazon's timely delivery of my order.

This monitor (Multisync LCD2490WUXi) is a cut above.
Colors, brightness and OSM are fantastic. I never knew
that my photos actually looked this good. However, I've
got a hot pixel 1/3 of the way down and 1/3 of the way
across the screen. And for a monitor of this price, it
should be perfect.