Here's Why I Will Not buy an LED
if you're such a pro Dante(no i will not bow down to you)
why don't you just buy a led screen instead of lcd?
MacHatch, I respect your points about the Pro versus Consumer display but as to your question of why I will not buy an LED Screen here is why:
Wide Gamut LED screens are currently not tuned for the kind of work I do. The gamut of colors is spread out over the same pixel resolution as a lower gamut LCD. Why is this bad? Because when you are editing photos, and print based output such as gradients, trade show displays, fine art, children's art, etc, the color deviation (called "Delta E") is greater between two adjacent pixels than it should be -- so what you work on, on the monitor does not match printed output.
Here is a URL from the "God of Monitors" Karl Lang, who developed many very high end displays explaining it in detail:
http://www.outbackphoto.com/tforum/viewtopic.php?TopicID=1700
And here is technical summary from the article of what I just said above:
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.
Current wide gamut LED monitors are not up to the task of what I do. They are too bright, they have the same problems as the wide gamut LCD's mentioned in the above quote, have too many ON SCREEN controls -- again the article link explains why this is bad -- they are not yet ready for the exacting work we do here. Many of these current LED monitors are still 8 bit in their communication with the internal video card, the video card on the CPU and with the OS. If they are 10bit, interpolation is used to improve the 8bit signal coming out of the software, the CPU and Video Card on the motherboard. This is unacceptable. Again, Lang details this in his article. Bottom line is this: the LED panels are the RIGHT choice for gaming, viewing content such as DVD, etc, and daily consumer use, they are not the right choice for Print, and I would say Video pros as of yet. The Video point is debatable, for sure.
Thanks for the comments, and please, never bow down to anyone. We should all be strong as individuals! Power to the People. Peace.
Dante
PS -- Even if Apple does release a new swank 30" LED or similar in January, there is NO WAY I am going to be an early adopter of this new panel without checking out each and every spec in absurd detail. I would take a proven 30" ACD with current technology over a questionable release by Apple in this category. In this respect, MacHatch, I am NO fanboy. I make 110% of my living doing this sort of work -- I will not let Apple put that at risk. Chances are I am buying another current technology 30" ACD within the next week to two months.
Here is an example of early adopters getting burned 1) iPhone (and I have one, btw) -- $200 price drop 2) new iMacs have some issues and 3) Leopard has some holes. I don't just buy stuff because it is "new" -- for me and my work, New, Swanky, does NOT equal Best.
cinema displays? i suppose we will know in less than 24 hours... 
