IPS Displays

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1

As a website designer I am looking into upgrading my 2x Benq G2420HD monitors into something better with much more accurate colours. Lately I have been looking at the Dell IPS displays as they look pretty nice.

The only challenge I am faced with which is preventing me from buying them is: even if I have these amazing monitors that will allow me to view my websites in their most accurate colours - how am I so sure that the rest of the web will be viewing my websites the same way?

Is there a program or perhaps a website that will allow me emulate what it would look like if I viewed my websites from different monitor model numbers? Or perhaps this is where the term “web safe colours” comes into play and I should never stray away from them if possible? For example, I will see white text on green background at 12px font size just fine on a Mac monitor, but on a $150 LCD monitor running Windows 7 it will show up washed out and hard to read. It’s a bit of a headache trying to guess how the audience will be seeing the website and if they can actually see the light grey on white as it is intended. (These forums are perhaps a good example of light grey and white - for me right now on the Benq’s the grey is hard to pick out unless I tilt my head down close to my keyboard and look up at my monitors.)

Any tips and or advise is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

2

I consider web safe colors a thing of the past, TBH. Yes, each monitor will look a bit different, but they seem to handle a wide range of colors well enough.

Well, there’s your problem really. You shouldn’t be doing that anyway, as it’s more than just which screen this is viewed on. Even on a nice Mac screen, many people will find that hard to read and inaccessible. The safest thing to do is make text, colors etc. clearly distinguished and easy to view, and let go of some of these graphic designer fetishes that make for such an inaccessible web. I don’t think many, if any, site visitors care much about the design, as long as the content is easy to find and digest.

3

You can’t be sure. Not taking into consideration the settings that can be changed at the monitor level, even two of the same make and model of a monitor can have color differences, though they may be slight. You also have to take the lighting conditions of the room the monitor is in. Even after calibrating the monitors (through hardware or software, which is mainly done by photographers and probably others in the arts), the color can drift over time and have to be re-calibrated.

4

The only time you should seriously consider an IPS monitor is if you are doing print work.

For web development, a good-quality LCD is fine.