Hacker News Reader

Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

As a designer, one should keep a couple of cheap, low-res monitors reset to the factory defaults for proofing what many users are going to see.

View on HN

I must confess I felt a lot of lust looking at the self color calibration feature.

It is extremely useful if your work ends up in paper. For photography (edit: film and broadcast, too) would be great.

My use case are comics and illustration, so a self-color-correcting cintiq or tablet would be great for me.

I like having a color calibrated monitor but at the end of the day it’s about trusting my scopes too. Audio unfortunately has this perception element that for some reason doesn’t seem as big of an issue with video. We have dB/loudness standards for a reason, but different stuff just sounds louder or softer no matter what.

If it looks good on a mac laptop screen/imac and the scopes look right, it’s good for 99%+ of viewers. You can basically just edit visually off any Mac laptop from the last 10 years and you’ll probably be happy tbh.

> If it looks good on a mac laptop screen/imac and the scopes look right, it’s good for 99%+ of viewers.

Light grey text on a white background looks good on a Mac, but pretty much unreadable for most users.

I’m talking specifically about photo/video. Typeface is a whole other ballgame. Looking back at my previous comment I can definitely see why that was not clear.

This is probably one of the few things I think works better in an office environment. There was older equipment hanging around with space to set it up in a corner so people could sit down and just go. When mobile came along there would be sustainable lending program for devices.

With more people being remote, this either doesn't happen, or is much more limited. Support teams have to repro issues or walk through scenarios across web, iOS, and Android. Sometimes they only have their own device. Better places will have some kind of program to get them refurb devices. Most times though people have to move the customer to someone who has an iPhone or whatever.

this exactly. same ppl do for sound, listen in the car, over shity headphones etc. - that's just quality control not the fault of any piece of equipment.

Yes this is universal in pro mixing setups, having filters or even actual physical hardware to provide the sound of stock earbuds, a crappy Bluetooth speaker, sound system in a minivan, etc.

Well, of course it's a good idea to double check with various output methods. But if a mix sounds good on studio monitors with a flattest possible frequency response (preferably even calibrated with an internal DSP) in an acoustically treated room, there's a very high probability it will sound good on almost anything out there. At least that's my experience.

I would reccomend one to take a look at the usual frequency response of cheap drivers or the inherent flaws of the consumer tech over time and compare it with the evolution of pop music.

Audio engineers are for sure taking all this into account, and more (:

Reply on news.ycombinator.com