STAIRWAY TO THE SKY (digital painting)

stairwaytothesky
Stairway to the Sky
Digital painting
32.11 by 19.22 inches
2007

Click on image for detailed larger image.

Detail.

[clear]

Got in the new NEC monitor. It’s a beauty. But it was a shocker. The screen is glossy black and I’m used to a matte finish.

When the UPS guy dropped it off he was on the run and literally pretty much threw it in my hands. This was Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, and I’d ordered it on Monday, so spectacularly fast delivery time from NewEgg.

I carried the box in, not so much excited as full of anxiety. You never know what you’re going to get with a new monitor, really. Will it work? Will there be dead pixels? I opened the box, lifted the monitor to the table, lifted the plastic protecting the monitor and saw staring back at me this glossy black mirror of a screen in which I could see myself and the room behind me.

Gack.

I panicked.

Not really. And kind of, yes.

Crawling under the bed to hide from the screen’s glassy eye, I called Marty at the studio. “It’s got a glossy finish! It’s got a glossy finish!”

Well, I didn’t crawl under the bed. Just under the comforter. So sue me.

After getting it set up and vaguely calibrated (well, fairly righteously calibrated but I’m still unsure about it and will do another profile tomorrow just to make sure) I spent Wednesday researching matte versus glossy monitors and found that there is no consensus on them, that some graphics people swear by glossy and some swear at glossy instead. Some say it is hard to do for print with them and others say with proper calibration it makes no difference. Some say glossy is harder on the eyes and some say not so. I can tell you this, contrast range is spectacular and reveals a few of my paintings being severely handicapped by previous monitors not having had that good a contrast ratio, not even my old wonderful CRT. So a few paintings will need to be reworked a bit.

Over the past few days I’ve become accustomed to its face and decided glossy is just fine for a desktop monitor under the kind of lighting conditions in which I typically work. I think.

Whatever, I’m accustomed and decided I’m keeping it. Because it is gorgeous. Plus, I know if I sent it back just because of the glossy screen, that I would end up ordering something else that would arrive not working or with dead pixels and then I’d be crying over having gone for Curtain #3 when I should have kept Curtain #2. Yes, the glossy was a shock but I seem to have adjusted quickly and am not missing the matte now at all.


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