Starting to feel like a real photographer again...it's New Monitor Day! (with 645 Pro for iPhone 4S, and Alien Skin Exposure 4)

Getting myself set up for work in Sydney, now - which means I've got an office on Oxford St, a desk, a chair, a place to plug in all my external hard drives (though half of those are at home - always better to keep backups in two locations, you know!), and as of today, a colour-calibrated monitor.

I've finally moved from an old Apple 30" Cinema Display to the brand-new Eizo ColorEdge CG276, which arrived today, and looks spectacular I must say.  The jump in quality isn't quite as great as when I first got a calibrated display (and discovered just how bad my retouching had been up to that point), but it's certainly an improvement on working from my laptop display - mostly hunched over a coffee table at home - for the last month or so since I moved from Wellington.

Of course, apart from the display itself, this thing has a few other party tricks -

• of course there's the terribly accurate colour, but also a wider colour gamut and finer ability to control brightness, so the image more closely resembles a print on paper;
• the display is also consistent (and visible) from a much wider range of angles of view than a lot of LCDs - especially laptops - and doesn't have the glossy finish of a lot of displays;
• the stand has a lot more range of adjustment, plus the ability to rotate 90° to view vertical / portrait images using the whole screen, and is incredibly smooth to raise, lower & turn the display;
• the monitor comes with a shade hood to keep external light from hitting the screen and throwing the colours / brightness off - it's even lined with black felt to completely limit reflection;
• down in the bottom left of the screen is a built-in calibration device, which I can schedule to check the accuracy of the screen whenever I like - even at night when I'm not here (though the instructions say to have it on for an hour first, so that's possibly not terribly useful)
• and as well as all that, I got a deal via the ACMP which means I can replace the stand with a free hydraulic arm, which means I can have it much closer to me than would be possible with the stand.  (I'll probably do that tomorrow or next week, I just wanted to make sure it worked before went to all that effort!)

So, all in all, I'm pretty darn happy with it!  And, fortunately, it's not showing me too many problems I couldn't see before, in the images I've edited in the past...