Buying Guide: The Best Monitors for Photo Editing in 2022 in the UAE and Saudi Arabia
Shopping for a panel for painstaking photo work? Photographers and other graphic and multimedia artists—whether professionals, students, or enthusiasts—are concerned with translating what's on the screen to a print, a photo book, or a web site with accurate color reproduction, and they have their own set of priorities and wants in a monitor. Whether you spend all day in Adobe Photoshop and other, similar creative applications for a living, or just tinker with landscape photos in your spare time, buying the right display for color-correct work will pay off many times over, versus simply snagging the seemingly nicest panel on sale at your local electronics mart.
Color accuracy, and understanding the technical terms and specs around it, are the keys to buying the best photo editing monitor for how you work. There is no single best monitor for photography; it depends on whether you're a graphics pro or just dabbling, and what the ultimate destination for your photos is. But with our help, you can find the right fit for your budget, and for what you do with your images after they leave your camera. We've laid out our top tested picks below, followed by a buying guide to monitors for photo work, and concluding with a big spec breakout of all our favorite models.
ViewSonic VP2785-4K
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| + 4K UHD resolution | - No built-in speakers |
| + Good selection of ports, including USBC | - HDR effect is relatively modest |
| + Covers 99 percent of the Adobe RGB color palette and 95 percent of DCI-P3 | - No adaptive sync support |
ViewSonic VP2785-4K
Why We Picked It
As careful parsing of its model number would suggest, the ViewSonic VP2785-4K ($899.99) brings a native 4K resolution to its 27-inch screen. Geared toward creative professionals such as photographers and video editors who require exacting, reproducible color in their images, this professional-grade monitor supports a wide color palette and is factory-calibrated for a host of common color spaces. It beautifully rendered photos and videos in our testing, supports the display of HDR content, and also can be used for low-impact gaming. It becomes our latest Editors' Choice professional monitor.
Asus ProArt PA34VC Professional Curved Monitor
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| + Excellent color accuracy | - Does not cover the full Adobe RGB color space |
| + Software calibration tools | |
| + Ultra-wide screen with 100Hz refresh rate, 1900R curvature, and HDR support |
Asus ProArt PA34VC Professional Curved Monitor
Why We Picked It
The Asus ProArt PA34VC Professional Curved Monitor ($999.99) is a cool, sprawling monitor for both work and play. It's designed for video editors, designers, and photographers, and it features excellent color accuracy, but it also includes a number of gaming-friendly features. Its curved, ultra-wide panel, with a 21:9 aspect ratio, is of a type more commonly seen in gaming monitors—as is its maximum 100Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync adaptive sync technology. It's an unusual hybrid of panel traits, and while not cheap, is a superb panel for bridging the gaming and creative worlds.
HP 24mh 23.8-inch 1080p FHD Monitor
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| + Excellent sRGB color coverage | - Warranty limited to one year |
| + High contrast ratio for an IPS monitor | - Brightness fell short of its rating |
| + DisplayPort, HDMI, and VGA connectors | |
| + Stand support height, pivot, and tilt adjustment | |
| + Built-in 2-watt speakers |
HP 24mh 23.8-inch 1080p FHD Monitor
Why We Picked It
Although it sells these days for just above $100 (the list price is $139.99), the HP 24mh 23.8-Inch Display is surprisingly feature-rich. Not only does this budget monitor, best for household or home-office use, come with an IPS screen with narrow bezels and superb sRGB color coverage, the 24mh adds several extras uncommon among budget monitors: built-in speakers, the ability to pivot from landscape to portrait mode, and a DisplayPort connector. This is enough for it to take its place as our latest Editors' Choice winner as a general-purpose, flat-panel budget monitor, alongside the curved-screen, similar-size Samsung CF396 we tested just before it.
Apple Pro Display XDR
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| + Exceptional color accuracy | - Super-expensive stand |
| + DisplayHDR 1600 looks incredible | - No input alternative to USBC |
| + High contrast ratio | - Matte-panel version costs $1000 more |
| + Sturdy build | |
| + Beautiful design | |
| + Functionality with Windows in Boot Camp |
Apple Pro Display XDR
Why We Picked It
Apple's $4,999 Pro Display XDR reference monitor is a welcome addition to a growing niche of panels that serve prosumer and professional content creators alike. This emerging class of "creator" displays provides reference-level color accuracy and extremely powerful HDR capabilities for a price that might seem high on the surface, but is fair, comparatively speaking, when you look at traditional alternatives. Apple's macOS doesn't have much of an HDR-ready content library (this is, after all, the first HDR display ever released by Apple), and the panel's Pro Stand is wildly pricey. But outside of those complaints, the Pro Display XDR stuns in every other metric it competes in, earning our Editors' Choice. Its exceptional design, sturdiness, and "just works" philosophy make it a must-have for pro-level, Mac-bound content creators. Windows- or Linux-based creators will want to go with alternatives like the Asus ProArt PA32UCX(Opens in a new window) instead (which we're also reviewing), since the Pro Display XDR works only with Apple devices.
BenQ PD3220U DesignVue Designer Monitor
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| + Good color accuracy | - Does not cover the full Adobe RGB color space |
| + Ergonomic stand | |
| + Large screen | |
| + UHD res | |
| + Improved HotKey Puck controller | |
| + Built-in KVM switch |
BenQ PD3220U DesignVue Designer Monitor
Why We Picked It
Designed for video editors, photographers, and graphic designers, the $1,199.99 BenQ PD3220U DesignVue Designer Monitor provides a 32-inch-class screen with a UHD (4K, or 3,840-by-2,160-pixel) native panel resolution, good color accuracy, a wide selection of ports, and a host of convenience features. Examples of the latter include an ergonomic stand, as well as a BenQ-specific accessory, the HotKey Puck, for manipulating the monitor's brightness, contrast, color-mode, and other settings on its onscreen display (OSD). It performed well in our testing for color accuracy, and it earns an Editors' Choice as a large-screen professional monitor.
Dell UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor Monitor (UP2720Q)
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| + Includes integrated calibration tool | - Pricey |
| + Very good color accuracy results | - Does not include the CalMAN software it integrates with |
| + Dual Thunderbolt 3 ports | - Low brightness for a professional monitor |
| + Intuitive OSD nav | - Test contrast ratio considerably lower than its rating |
| + Height, tilt, swivel, and pivot control |
Dell UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor Monitor (UP2720Q)
Why We Picked It
As its name implies, the $1,999.99 Dell UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor (UP2720Q) is a 27-inch 4K monitor that is all about color accuracy and image quality. Unlike the vast majority of monitors, and even most displays geared to creative pros, the UP2720Q has a built-in colorimeter that you can use not just to measure the monitor's color accuracy in a range of color modes, but to calibrate the monitor itself. To this end, it seamlessly integrates with Portrait Displays' CalMAN display-calibration software. From the monitor's settings, you can also schedule regular calibrations to ensure that the monitor retains its excellent color accuracy. This powerful tool, plus conveniences like two Thunderbolt 3 ports, makes this UltraSharp model our latest Editors' Choice among professional monitors.
Dell UltraSharp 27 4K USB-C Monitor (U2720Q)
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| + UHD native res | - On the pricey side |
| + Good color gamut coverage | |
| + Solid port selection | |
| + Supports height, tilt, swivel, and pivot adjustment |
Dell UltraSharp 27 4K USB-C Monitor (U2720Q)
Why We Picked It
Dell's $719.99 UltraSharp 27 4K USB-C Monitor (U2720Q) is a 27-inch productivity monitor with UHD resolution, solid color accuracy, and a full set of ergonomic controls. It offers the performance and features of a high-end business monitor geared to workers involved in color-critical tasks such as processing photos for upload. The U2720Q lies between basic 27-inch 4K displays and professional models geared to graphic-arts studios. In some ways, it's akin to the Editors' Choice Dell UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor (UP2720Q). Both feature UHD resolution, as well as a similar design and feature set, and both emphasize color accuracy. Think of the U2720Q as a productivity monitor for employees who need to work with photos and graphics now and then; the UP2720Q is a true professional monitor that includes a built-in calibration tool, which boosts its price considerably. The U2720Q is its "lite" alternative.
Lenovo ThinkVision P32U-10
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| + Large, high-res 4K screen | - Pricey |
| + Exceptional color accuracy for sRGB and Adobe RGB | - Poorly designed OSD controsl |
| + Dual Thunderbolt 3 ports let you daisy-chain monitors | |
| + Full range of ergonomic features |
The Bottom Line:
Lenovo's ThinkVision P32u-10 is a winner, whether you think of it as a productivity monitor with exceptional color accuracy or as a professional monitor with a slew of convenience features.
Why We Picked It
Although it is a business monitor primarily geared to productivity—its large, high-resolution screen makes it good for reading small text, scanning cramped spreadsheets, and viewing detail in blueprints—the Lenovo ThinkVision P32u-10 has the color accuracy and quality to appeal to photography studios and graphic arts professionals. Its $1,349 list price tag is hefty (though we've seen the monitor from resellers in places for under a grand), but for companies looking for an exceptional panel, its features may be worth the premium. As a productivity and professional monitor rolled into one, it earns our latest Editors' Choice.
MSI Summit MS321UP
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| + Spacious 4K IPS display | - Fairly pricey |
| + Excellent sRGB and DCI-P3 color coverage | - Doesn't pivot between landscape and portrait modes |
| + Bright with high contrast | |
| + Renders HDR content | |
| + Attractive design |
MSI Summit MS321UP
Why We Picked It
With a bright high-resolution panel and impressive color coverage, the MSI Summit MS321UP ($799.99) is an appealing big-screen productivity monitor for graphic artists, video producers, and photographers. It can render HDR content and it exceeded its rated contrast ratio in our testing. The Summit is on the costly side and lacks some of the docking-station and videoconferencing features we've enjoyed in other business displays, but it should prove a very capable choice for creative employees.
Acer ConceptD CM2241W
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| + Bright panel | - No USBC port |
| + Great color accuracy | - Expensive for a 24" monitor |
| + Full set of ergonomic features | |
| + Nifty wood-tone base |
The Bottom Line:
Acer's ConceptD CM2241W is small and relatively low-res for a content-creation monitor, but it offers accurate colors. It's a good choice for space-strapped photography students and junior creative pros.
Why We Picked It
Acer's ConceptD CM2241W ($399), a 24-inch monitor geared to content creators, is modest in size and resolution but capable of rendering accurate color. It's a bit pricey for its size, but it may be worth the investment, particularly if you're an art or photography student, or you live in a space into which you can't fit a larger display but need dead-on color accuracy. Also, it bucks the trend toward ever-wider screens by giving you more vertical space to work with.
Monitors for Photo Editing 101: How to Buy the Best
Wide-gamut monitors, which let you select from a palette of more than a billion colors, are the cat's meow when it comes to photography, although it is important that they adequately cover the particular color space(s) that you will be using. If you're working with a 14-bit or 16-bit RAW file, you'll want to get a display that can show you the subtleties contained within each image you capture.
Nowadays, a digital connection such as DisplayPort, Thunderbolt 3 (with Thunderbolt 4 on the way), USB-C (typically carrying a DisplayPort signal), or DVI is standard, but you will want to match up your panel with the output of your PC or Mac. Look for a display with an in-plane switching (IPS) panel and least an 8-bit lookup table (LUT); it will be able to pull images from a palate of 16.7 million colors. (More about IPS and screen types in the next section.) Moving to a top-end panel with a 10-bit LUT expands that number to more than a billion—generally speaking. To achieve that number, though, you'll need a high-end display designed for photographers, but be prepared to pay premium dollars.
Screen Technology: IPS Rules
The vast majority of LCD panels geared toward photographers and graphic artists use IPS technology, though a select few models like the LG OLED48C1 are beginning to gravitate toward OLED as 2022 trundles on. IPS has several advantages over other commonly used LCD hardware technologies such as twisted nematic (TN) and vertical alignment (VA). It offers wide viewing angles (up to 178 degrees for both vertical and horizontal); these are the maximum angular distance from looking in front of a screen to looking from the side (or above) without a change of brightness or shift in colors. IPS displays tend to have better viewing angles than VA panels, and much better ones than TN panels.
Also, IPS panels are known for having the most accurate colors of the three. IPS panels in monitors designed for creative professionals tend to have higher color depth (up to 10 bits; these are the panels that can chose from a palette of more than a billion colors) than most TN or VA displays, and support a wider color gamut, often covering all—or nearly all—of the Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 color spaces. VA panels may cover the sRGB space but not much more, and TN displays have even more limited color coverage.
For now, at least, IPS panels rule the roost when it comes to photo editing, though it may not be that way forever. One promising technology is organic light-emitting diode (OLED), which seems to do well at displaying colors, but is quite expensive. OLED is used mostly on select laptop screens and on smartphones, but it hasn’t made much of an inroad into standalone monitors—yet.
How to Assess Color Spaces and Color Coverage
A color space is a defined range of colors. An important factor in evaluating a professional monitor to be used in photo editing is determining which specific color spaces you will be working in, and what percentage of colors in a given color space the monitor is capable of showing. Common color spaces cited in display manufacturers' specs include sRGB, Adobe RGB, DCI-P3, NTSC, and Rec.709. Photographers will be most interested in sRGB and Adobe RGB, as they were developed with photos and still images in mind.
First, though, a bit about the other, more cinema-oriented color spaces. Professional monitors are often calibrated for one or more of these spaces in addition to sRGB and (in some cases) Adobe RGB, and creative artists may work with video as well as photos. DCI-P3 was defined by the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), a consortium of major motion-picture producers. It is geared toward digital video projection. NTSC, developed by the National Television Standards Committee (NTSC), covers a gamut similar to Adobe RGB. And Rec.709, a standard for HDTV, is widely used in video projects. Its color space is identical to that of sRGB; the difference is in their tone response curves (aka gamma) to account for differences in ambient light. (TVs tend to be used in darker settings, while computer monitors are often set up and used in brighter rooms.)
Most professional monitors have dedicated picture modes—accessible through the panel's onscreen display (OSD)—for sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3, and we test their color coverage in all three modes. If you are purely a photographer, or a photo editor, you can ignore the DCI-P3 results, but they will come into play if you work with video.
Whether you primarily use sRGB or Adobe RGB depends on how you show your photos to the world. If your images are all to be posted online, a monitor that displays the full sRGB color spectrum is fine. sRGB is the standard color space for the web and many other applications. Even though Adobe RGB has a wider range of possible colors—sRGB encompasses only about 70% of the Adobe RGB gamut—websites will not be able to display the additional colors. What's more, if you do upload art saved in Adobe RGB to the web, it will be automatically converted to sRGB, with the colors often looking duller than if you had shot it or saved it to sRGB in the first place.
That said, Adobe RGB does have a considerably wider color gamut than sRGB, and savvy photographers may be able to coax a more vivid range of colors when printing Adobe RGB images, whether they're outputting their own prints or working with a commercial service. They will want a monitor that will display them to full advantage. Many monitors cover both bases, touting near-100% coverage for both sRGB and Adobe RGB. With those monitors, if you need to switch color spaces, you simply change the mode via the OSD.
Understanding Color Accuracy
A monitor's color accuracy—how close a displayed color looks to the way it is intended—is determined by a measurement known as Delta E (dE, for short). It represents the difference between the hue of a displayed color and the input that the monitor received. The dE figure that appears in monitor specs—reflecting dE2000, the current standard—is the average of a large number of individual color readings from across the spectrum. The lower the value, the more accurate the color. You don't necessarily need the best monitor for color accuracy in every respect, but you want one that excels in the specific color spaces that make sense for your photo work.
Most professional monitors come pre-calibrated with a dE of less than 2 for sRGB, and often for Adobe RGB as well. Depending on the colors involved, a dE of less than 2 would be hard for an untrained observer to discern, while a dE of less than 1 would be imperceptible to most anyone without specialized measuring equipment.
In evaluating professional monitors, we use the ColorChecker function in Portrait Displays' Calman 5 color calibration program to measure the dE for a given color space. Below is an example of the results (in this case, for a Lenovo ThinkVision P32u-10 panel when we tested it in Adobe RGB mode)...
The chromaticity chart on its right shows the position of the individual color measurements, while the bar chart at far left depicts the Delta E for each point. All of the bars are short, with no points more than 2 and many less than 1. Below that chart are the figures for the average and maximum dE; the average dE of 0.88 for this monitor is excellent, i.e., it passed with flying colors (so to speak).
A Bit About Calibration Tools
A few professional displays have built-in calibration tools, and some will ship with an external colorimeter that you drape over the monitor to calibrate it. The latter, typically, shows a series of color patches and uses software to create an ICC profile to properly adjust colors.
When that hardware is combined with a separate ICC profile for your printer and paper type, you can use soft proofing tools, like those found in Adobe Lightroom ($9.99 per month at Adobe), on your display to see how your prints will look on paper. If your LCD doesn't ship with a calibration tool, consider getting a Datacolor Spyder or an X-Rite i1 calibrator. You'll want to calibrate your monitor at least once every 30 days.
What Kind of Finish Should I Get in a Photo Editing Monitor?
Matte displays have an anti-glare coating. They can be calibrated more accurately, and they tend to show a truer image versus the more popular high-gloss displays, which give colors an oversaturated look. Plus, you won't have to deal with as many reflections. Fortunately, you can find many monitors with anti-glare screens to choose from.
Depending on your work environment and just how critical your work is, you also might consider a display with a hood. A hood will block ambient light that comes at your display from the sides and top, so you won't have to worry about light, say, coming in from a window affecting how your display looks at different points in the day.
You can find third-party generic hoods for notebooks and for the iMac, but for the best fit, you're better off opting for a display that has a dedicated hood from the manufacturer included, or available as an accessory. Fortunately, many professional monitors do.
Ergonomic Features to Look For
Most professional monitors have stands that support some combination of the standard ergonomic comfort features: height, tilt, swivel, and pivot control.
Pivot control lets you rotate a monitor 90 degrees on its stand joint, from landscape up into portrait mode, and back. It's handy if you tend to work with photos in this kind of vertical orientation.
Pivot control also offers a surprise fringe benefit, in that when you swing the monitor up into its portrait orientation, it makes it easy to access the ports. On many displays of this kind, the ports are downward-facing in back and would otherwise be hard to reach, particularly considering that some photo-centric monitors are on the large and heavy side.
Do You Need a 4K Monitor for Photo Editing? Size and Resolution
Go with as big a display as your workspace and budget can afford, and one with an appropriately dense resolution. Remember that a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel monitor is only 2 megapixels—if you're shooting with a 20-megapixel SLR, that's nothing. Thankfully, this will come naturally when looking for one that hits the other features. Most 27-inch models suited for graphical work feature at least a 2,560-by-1,440-pixel native resolution, but 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) models are now widely available.
Also, keep in mind that pixel density—how closely the pixels are spaced, as measured in pixels per inch (ppi)—is an important factor in determining how sharp a monitor's displayed image will look. For a given resolution, the larger the screen size, the lower the pixel density will be. We recommend that a monitor used for photo editing have a pixel density of at least 100ppi. As an extreme example, with a 32-inch screen and "6K" (6,016-by-3,384-pixel) native resolution, the Apple Pro Display XDR has a phenomenal pixel density of 216ppi. Of course, monitors with such ultra-high resolutions have rarified prices, as well.
Depending on your workflow and desk space, you may want to consider a secondary display, too, regardless of what you choose as your primary LCD. iMac users, for example, can load up the majority of Lightroom's tools on the iMac's glossy 27-inch display to browse through catalogs and make adjustments, while viewing a full-screen version of the image they're working on using the second monitor, or vice versa. But we wouldn't go smaller than 24 inches in that scenario.
So, Which Monitor Should I Buy for Photo Editing?
Those are the high points—obviously you'll want to read some reviews in detail before investing in a display for your personal photography work or business. Just consider how often you print and how demanding your clients are—these are good guidelines to figure out how much you want to spend on a display. If you are a hobbyist who prints occasionally and shares many photos online, or a student learning the ropes, you won't need to spend for a top-end model that a high-end wedding photographer needs, who counts on perfect prints to put food on the table.
Reflecting our suggested, tested monitor picks up top, below we've outlined their key specs in a big breakout table. Roll on down and check 'em out!