Ron Martinsen's Photography Blog: 9/1/18

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

REVIEW: NEC PA271Q-BK 27" 16:9 Color-Critical IPS Monitor

NEC PA271Q-BK 27" 16:9 Color-Critical IPS Monitor

Since December 2014, my primary display has been my huge NEC PA322UHD which I've loved for the screen real estate. However, when I read about the latest PA series display with its improved color accuracy, I had to try it out.

While I'll admit, that I miss the huge 32" 4k display for its size, I have appreciated that this display is much more color accurate which is very important when doing color critical photo editing and soft proofing.

Photoshop looks spectacular on this 16:9 aspect ratio WQHD resolution display that is 2560 pixels wide by 1440 pixels tall (or 109 ppi):

In fact, if you have a compatible video card you can even enjoy over a billion colors by enabling 30 Bit Display

What this will do is eliminate banding in grayscale or color images when you use good video cables that can support it! However, be careful with this if you'll be printing because no printer made supports 30 bit printing, so it can cause you to miss some banding issues which could occur during printing.

For everyday use Excel 365 still goes out to a whopping AM61:

So while it might not be 4k it's still plenty of screen real estate to get a lot more done than traditional 1080p or 1920x1200 displays.

Inputs Galore

This display features lots of I/O ports both on the bottom (shown in silver on the left below) and on the side (shown in black on the right below):

In fact, this is what you get:

1 x DisplayPort
1 x Mini DisplayPort
2 x HDMI
1 x USB Type-C
3 x USB (USB 3.1) Input
3 x USB (USB 3.1) Output

To learn more about the specs of this display be sure to visit the PA271Q product page.

NaViSet Administrator 2™

Want to do an Ethernet management of your NEC displays? No problem, check out the control you have using the NaViSet Administrator software:

Remotely adjust almost any parameter or setting found within the On Screen Display menu
Gather valuable information pertaining to a Windows computer such as model name, OS version, memory and CPU (Windows version only)

Any information that is gathered about connected devices is stored in a local database and can be exported for later review

Automatically issue email alerts if a diagnostic error is reported by a device or a setting has been changed

Schedule periodic polling for singular or multiple devices at specific times or on demand

Sort connected devices into groups to help organize collections of display and computers

Assign an electronic Asset Tag to a device to provide a secure method of tracking an product over a network

Click here to see a video to learn more about what you can do.

Easily Switch Between 2 Computers with 1 Mouse & Keyboard

This display acts as a KVM switch so you if you are like me and you have a Macbook Pro and a Windows PC that you want to use with this display and a single mouse and keyboard, then it's no problem. Just press the input button to go back and forth between the two as shown here:

Calibration Settings

I calibrate to the settings shown above and set my preferences to use 52 calibration and profile steps. Here's the information summary for this display after calibration:

An impressive 0.25 Delta E beats even the best Eizo's that I've tested. What this means in simple terms is that the color accuracy on this display is phenomenal.

Learn more about this display in this short 40 second video:

Conclusion

This is the most color accurate, fastest to color critical temperature, display I've used in years. For Eizo fans looking for a cheaper alternative where you sacrifice nothing, this is the display for you!

Now I want a 32" UHD version of this display, because I love this one so much that it would be hard to go back to my 4K display again!

Simply put, if you care about color accuracy and a display that is going to hold your calibration settings plus come up to temperature quickly, then this is the display for you!

Where to Buy?

CLICK HERE to learn more or buy today on B&H or click here to find it on Amazon.

Disclosure

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The opinions provided are of Ron Martinsen alone and do not reflect the view of any other entity

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

REVIEW: Epson PictureMate PM-400 - A Great Whole Family Photo Printer

Epson PictureMate 400

Despite my history of printing my own images and even writing a book on the subject as part of my Printing Series, my beautiful wife has no desire to geek out on printing like me. As a result, she's been frustrated with the bottleneck (me) in getting prints made from her iPhone pics or from the photos I share with her from my DSLR and mirrorless cameras. To address this frustration, I decided to test the wildly popular Epson PictureMate PM-400 wireless compact color photo printer to see if it would meet her needs.

Setup

The nice thing about this printer is you don't need a computer, so you just turn it on - plug in the 4 color ink cartridge and you are in business. You can then quickly print to Epson 4x6 or 5x7 photo paper directly from your cell phone or SD card.

The wireless networking setup was easy and my Windows 10 PC had no problems discovering the printer. I also connected it via USB and saw no noticeable performance difference so I decided to take advantage of wireless printing so I could put the printer anywhere in the house where we were sitting when we wanted to crank out some pics while talking or watching TV.

AirPrint vs Windows

AirPrint is known for being easy and reliable, but it's also known for being very simplistic. With this in mind, I decided to print some photos off of my iPhone X and everything went pretty smooth. For large photos not taken on the phone it did seem to take nearly an extra 30 seconds to print a photo via AirPrint vs Windows, but if you aren't hovering over it like someone trying to watch water boil, the difference was tolerable.

Test Images & Performance

For comparison, I also pitted the inexpensive PM-400 against the excellent Epson SureColor P800 which costs nearly $1000 more just to see how wide the quality and performance gap was between the two - and the results surprised me!

Into the Light by Ron Martinsen on 500px.com

For my first image, I thought I'd start with an excellent photo with a wide range of tones to see what was the best this printer could do. The PM-400, which had been turned off for a couple weeks took 2 minutes 17 seconds for first print with 46.5 seconds for head prep before paper feed from cold start. This means roughly a minute and 30 seconds for this image to print for a roughly 36mb print job which was NOT specially prepared for this printer - I just threw an original JPEG at it.

PM-400 From Photoshop with Printer Manages Colors & Default Settings

The quality was average viewer good, but obviously with 4 colors you aren't going to get a match to the original. It actually looks quite a bit better in real life than the scan of the print here, so don't let the quality here scare you - in real life it seems "good enough" for most users and I think better than what you get from discount photo printing labs like Costco, Walgreens, Target, etc...

For my photography geek friends, here's the Photoshop and printer driver settings I used:

Surprisingly the P800 took 2 minutes and 3 seconds with 11 seconds before the paper feed on a cold start. This means it took one minute and 52 seconds, but the tonal range was significantly better in the highlight areas on the cheeks.

Epson SureColor P800 from Photoshop with Printer Manages Color using the sRGB preset

Despite being printed on the same Epson 4 Stars Premium Glossy paper and not using any ICC profiles or complex print features, the P800 was pretty darn close the original photo. Had I used an ICC profile I could have got an identical match.

Again, for my printing geek friends here's the settings I used to get this print:

Black & White Test

To the novice who has never done fine art printing, one would think that Black & White printing would be very easy and there's no difference between the two. However, the reality is that B&W printing is actually rather complicated and hard to get right simply because printers aren't using just black ink to print out a "black and white" image (which is really a grayscale image).

Here's the source image I used:

When the PM-400 was warm it only took 10 seconds before the paper had been pulled into position and it started printing resulting in a total print time of 1 minute 37 seconds for a 57.4 mb job over a wireless network connection. The P800 ABW did it in 2 minutes 2 seconds with 11 seconds which was the real kicker that I'd see consistently in my testing - the PM-400 was actually faster at cranking out a 4x6 photo!

Epson PM-400 Grayscale

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you - the black and white images often taken on a blue/purple tone depending on the ambient light that you view them under. It doesn't look quite as extreme as what you get from a scan in real life, but it's off - way off - from reality. Again, my wife thought it was fine but this one that was tough for me to accept.

I used the same Photoshop settings as above but here's the settings I used for the driver:

This time there was no contest in terms of tonal fidelity - the extra $1000 made a huge difference as you'd expect from a high end photo printer:

Epson P800 using Epson's Advanced Black & White (ABW) Mode

Epson P800 Windows V3 Driver using Advanced B&W Photo mode

For more information about Epson Advanced B&W Photo mode see my ABW article.

Casual Print Test

Here's a 100% unedited photo I took with my iPhone X:

I printed directly from from my phone using AirPrint to the PM-400 and in 1 minute 30 seconds I had a nice borderless print.

Using my P800 via AirPrint on my phone was 1 minute 56 seconds which was surprising.

On Windows with Photoshop even when I told the driver to do borderless with max expansion, the aspect ratio of the photo caused me to get white bars on both the left and right side. To fix this problem I simply tried right-clicking on the photo in Explorer and choosing Print to use the Windows Print Pictures Wizard which resulted me in getting the same borderless results as AirPrint. This is primarily due to the aspect ratio of iPhone prints vs digital camera prints which means that a true borderless print is going to crop more off the top and bottom of the print than one with white bars on the side. Keep this in mind when choosing borderless!

Quality-wise I saw the same differences in skin tones especially in the hot spots of the photos and in the cheeks as I saw with the model shot above, but it was less noticeable in a natural light photo.