I’m currently writing this entry using a new monitor I’ve acquired this year. It’s not a super nice monitor, but it is a nice 24″ IPS monitor.

I mainly got it because I do a lot of photo editing and printing. And my laptop screen wasn’t working out as well as I’d like. I would edit photos and they’d look great on my screen, but then when I printed the photo or looked at the photo on a different display, it would look slightly different.

So, finally I got a better monitor. I plan on getting a calibrator eventually, but what I have has been a great improvement. And because it’s IPS, I don’t have to worry about having it at the wrong angle. (With your non-IPS laptop, you may notice that when you tilt the screen a little, it will look slightly different. What a pain if you edited all your photos with the screen tilted at the wrong angle.)

It’s kind of astonishing to me to think that I could have gone through my entire life using my own computer/monitor, not knowing that the image was off… with all my photos looking great on my monitor, when they perhaps are actually not as bright, or of the wrong tint. If I never calibrated my screen, or if I never saw my photos displayed on other people’s monitors, I would have never noticed that they were slightly off/different than I expected.