What I am about to say applies to medium to high end Print Design work and photography where matching color from a monitor to printed piece is critical.
I used to believe wide gamut monitors where the way to go and almost bought the samsung quoted above or the new HP. That was until I read this post by Karl Lang (Hes the father of both the original PressView, ColorMatch RGB and the Artisan. He is a guru of Color Management).
He says:
"1) A wide gamut LCD display is not a good thing for most (95%) of high
end users. The data that leaves your graphic card and travels over the
DVI cable is 8 bit per component. You can't change this. The OS, ICC
CMMs, the graphic card, the DVI spec, and Photoshop will all have to be
upgraded before this will change and that's going to take a while. What
does this mean to you? It means that when you send RGB data to a wide
gamut display the colorimetric distance between any two colors is much
larger. As an example, lets say you have two adjacent color patches one
is 230,240,200 and the patch next to it is 230,241,200. On a standard
LCD or CRT those two colors may be around .8 Delta E apart. On an Adobe
RGB display those colors might be 2 Delta E apart on an ECI RGB display
this could be as high as 4 delta E.
It's very nice to be able to display all kinds of saturated colors you
may never use in your photographs, however if the smallest visible
adjustment you can make to a skin tone is 4 delta E you will become
very frustrated very quickly.
2) More bits in the display does not fix this problem. 10 bit LUTs, 14
Bit 3D LUTs, 10 bit column drivers, time-domain bits, none of these
technologies will solve problem 1. Until the path from photoshop to the
pixel is at least 10 bits the whole way, I advise sticking to a display
with something close to ColorMatch or sRGB."
<end>
So basically, he explains that this wide gamut leads to more difference between corresponding pixels: difference that will only lead to problems in color adjustment as the video data path and printers cannot possible maintain this diversity.
In his article he recommends the NEC 1990SXI, on up -- then the Apple's, Sony's and Samsungs and then the Eizo (actually says these are the best, but for the high cost). He indicates that the LaCies are basically an NEC with their label on it.
One last piece of info regarding Apple's lack of display controls, Lang says:
"The fact that Apple's display has no controls other than
backlight is actually a very good thing for an 8-8-8 LCD if your going
to use calibration. Apple optimizes the factory LUTs so as to provide
the most individual colors. smooth greyscale and the least loss. Then
the calibration is done in the graphic card LUT. As these are all 8 bit
it's best if the user does not mess with the display LUTs at all."
So there you have it. Again the above applies to print and photography, not video as most certainly a wide gamut in video is crucial to approach the full NTSC spectrum.
Here is the a link to his post:
http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9613&hl=prosense
DJO