LaCie showcases hella-expensive display
$4,240 gets you 30 inches
Macworld Expo Storage and display vendor LaCie showcased its recently released 730 LCD Monitor at this week's Macworld Expo, a jaw-droppingly gorgeous 30in display with an equally jaw-dropping price of $4240 (about £2785).
Who on God's green earth would pay well over four-thousand bucks for an LCD display, even one as lovely as this one? Even Apple - a company not known for its low, low prices - charges just $1799 for its 30-incher, and PC Connection is offering the well-received 30-inch Samsung SyncMaster 305T for just $1249.
You may not be able to afford it, but you probably don't need it
To answer that question, let's first look at the 730's specs: It's an LED-backlit screen, which ensures instant-on and even illumination, plus intense colors. It has a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1600. Not too shabby. But, still, pixels are just pixels. LaCie claims a contrast ratio of a killer 1000:1 and viewing angles of 178 degrees both horizontally and vertically.
But here's where things get interesting: The 730 LCD Monitor has a color gamut of 123 per cent of Adobe RGB and 125 of NTSC specs. Such a broad gamut ensures a lossless workflow, meaning that the 730 can keep up with the enlarged gamuts of high-end cameras and printing processes.
In addition, the 730 uses a 14-bit look-up table, which allows gradients to be displayed with greater accuracy and smoothness than they are on lesser monitors. Also, the 730 employs what LaCie calls ColorKeeper technology, which, according to the company, "constantly analyzes the brightness and chromaticity of the backlight and adjusts it in real time" to ensure stable colors.
Finally, the 730 is bundled with LaCie's UGRA-certified Proof Edition of its calibration software, to be best used in conjunction with the company's blue eye pro calibration hardware.
This is not a display to be used for spreadsheets or by sysadmins. This is a display for creative pros who take color seriously, and who make money - in some cases, lots of money - from their chromatic expertise.
And so the answer to the "Who on god's green earth?" question is simple: people who know exactly what shade of green that earth is - and who make a lot of green by using their well-trained eyeballs. ®
COMMENTS
Buy it when the model is 2-3 years old
Scott Broukell posted Friday 9th January 2009 10:26 GMT"
"I'm sure I'm not alone in this regard, but I find the best bang for your buck is to use kit that is 2 -3 years old. I love to read the reviews on new stuff and gasp at the prices knowing that the bits I choose will be mine for a lot less in two years or so (mostly)."
I'm completely with you, Scott. Whenever possible, I buy second-hand, reconditioned, B-stock--be it a car, a camera, a display, or even a hard drive. Hell, I even acquired my first and second wives second-hand! But back in 1993, I "needed" a large display with 1600 x 1200 resolution at a refresh rate of 75 Hz or higher so I could do technical publishing. The only offerings were Nokia's new 445X 21-inch color CRT (102 kHz scan rate) at $2550 U.S. and Matrox's 4GB graphics board at $930 U.S. I had to take out a 3-year loan to buy them. Now, thankfully, one can buy a monitor and board with specs that put these to shame, without breaking the bank. By the way, my family still uses that Nokia monitor on one of its PCs!
Re: Adrian Esdaile's comment
Why exactly are the comments moderated when we can get away with wishing death upon a person due to us disliking their choice of... display connectors? Irritating.
Regarding the product: Whee, nice! I'm not even a color pro and I'd still love to have something with this kind of performance just to look at photos. Yet, as already said, too bad it's a LaCie.
It's an LCD
It'd be overpriced if they were giving it away.
Mine's the one made from flexible OLED panels.
All 30" monitors are overpriced
Compared to the very nice 24" 1920x1200 screens out these days. You can get them for £200 these days, and spend the £800 saved on something more useful (cintiq tablet, or graphics card + 2 extra 24" displays).
I mostly work at 3840 x 2160 anyway (and then shrink for a sharper image), so will save my money for whenever a monitor company can produce something stupidly hi-res and gigantic.
Alternatively, maybe one day seamless multi-monitor displays will finally become something other than vapourware product demos. *fingers crossed*
@Adam
Damn it, I've got to get onto The Register earlier.
It's be amusing if you weren't able to remove the hood either: I can view it at 178° from all angles, but I can't with this bloody hood.
