Hello,
Can anyone recommend a good value PC monitor for 1) acquisition and 2) IMARIS-like processing.
Better to go off-microscope-supplier for these? Budget is ~£750, but very happy to go under!
Thoughts on curve?
Many thanks all!
Best,
Dr Darren Thomson
University of Exeter
The key limit is you ideally want the monitor to at least have higher resolution than your images, so that you can look at the whole image at 1x zoom. For example, on one of our scopes we have a 3200x3200 pixel camera, so we have a 4k monitor on that scope, which definitely would fall in your budget (ours came in a bit below $400).
I would stay away from curved at it distorts the geometry, where straight lines are no longer straight on a curved projection. As such curved monitors are great for gaming and entertainment, but straight monitors are better for quantitative image processing.
That said, I now do a lot of image processing on my computer at home which has a curved monitor, and haven’t really had any issue.
Also, if you do go with high resolution, make sure the monitor is sufficiently large. Microscopic pixels aren’t terribly helpful when trying to see fine detail in your images.
Ah great point @llamero about pixels #, 4k seems a must, and not v.expensive these days.
Curved seems poor when trying to show someone else, who isn’t sitting centrally, points of interests.
I’ve learnt that ‘panel tech’ is important for viewing angles. The TN-monitors do not allow good viewing angles. while IPS/VA are better for seeing the screen from off-centre.
Does anyone have any comment wrt to colour/brightness quality? OLEDs seem to burn into the screen if left on long enough.
8bit colour fine for our eyes?
Thanks in advance!
This article is relevant:
There’s also “Bayer-like Filtering” occurring in many microscopes.The pattern of RGB pixels on a color camera usually includes more green pixels (human eyes similar to color cameras - more sensitive to green than other colors). It is different than the arrangement of pixels in most monitors. If the microscope is point scanning or using monochrome cameras, then you have division into pseudo-color individual channels to display.
Another key point is that if the Monitor will be used for 3/4D rendering the rendering will be slowed a little if it has to render at 4k. How much slower I’m not sure, but I guess you could always downsample your monitors pixel format to speed this up for rendering/moving around
Thanks a lot for the thread. This information was helpful to me.