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Shopping for a panel for painstaking photo work? Photographers and other graphic and multimedia artists at all levels have their own priorities and wants in a monitor, and buying the right display for color-correct work will pay off many times over. PC Labs has decades of experience testing monitors, way back to the days of CRTs, and we subject today's photo-centric displays to rigorous brightness, contrast, color-coverage, and accuracy testing. We also render a standard selection of photos and video images on each monitor for analysis. Our overall pick for best photo-editing monitor is the Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved Thunderbolt Hub Monitor (U4025QW), but no single monitor is best for all photo-editing scenarios and budgets. We've laid out our top tested picks below, as well as a buying guide to monitors for photo work and a big spec breakout of our favorite models.
Our Top Tested Picks
Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved Thunderbolt Hub Monitor (U4025QW)
Asus ProArt Display OLED PA32DC
ViewSonic ColorPro VP2776
HP 24mh 23.8-Inch Display
Dell UltraSharp 27 4K USB-C Hub Monitor (U2723QE)
Apple Pro Display XDR
BenQ PD3220U DesignVue Designer Monitor
ViewSonic ColorPro VP16-OLED Portable Monitor
Wacom Cintiq Pro 27
Alogic Clarity Pro Touch
The Best Monitor Deals This Week*
- Alienware AW3423DWF 34" 2K QD-OLED Curved Monitor — $699.99 (List Price $899.99)
- Samsung UJ59 32" 4K FreeSync Monitor — $229.99 (List Price $339.99)
- LG UltraGear 32GP750-B 32" 1440p 165Hz IPS Monitor — $236.99 (List Price $399.99)
- Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 43" 4K 144Hz 1MS Gaming Monitor — $879.99 (List Price $999.99)
- Asus ZenScreen MB16ACV 15.6" 1080p Portable IPS Monitor — $159.00 (List Price $209)
*Deals are selected by our commerce team
Best Overall Monitor for Photo Editing
Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved Thunderbolt Hub Monitor (U4025QW)
- Magnificent image quality
- High contrast, thanks to IPS Black panel tech
- Higher-than-4K resolution and pixel density
- Two Thunderbolt 4 ports
- Hub of six USB downstream ports
- Low-impact audio from built-in speakers
- Pricey
The Dell UltraSharp 40 combines a massive port selection with a magnificent, high-contrast screen to make a nearly perfect monitor for photographers, videographers, and other creative pros who can afford it.
Best Overall 4K Monitor for Photo Editing
Asus ProArt Display OLED PA32DC
- Superior color gamut coverage
- Offers multiple HDR modes
- Included colorimeter works well
- Extra stand and monitor hood included
- Handle for mobility
- Refresh rate tops out at 60Hz
- High Delta E in testing
- Expensive
The Asus PA32DC OLED is a top-of-the-line content creation monitor, perfectly suited for professionals and enthusiasts looking for the best of the best.
Best Overall 1440p Monitor for Photo Editing
ViewSonic ColorPro VP2776
- Bright panel
- 165Hz refresh rate
- Magnetically attached glare-blocking hood
- ColorPro Wheel serves as an easy, effective calibration tool
- Relatively low resolution, pixel density for a professional monitor
- High Delta E out of the box in the DCI-P3 space (though easily fixed with included tool)
The Asus PA32DC OLED is a top-of-the-line content creation monitor, perfectly suited for professionals and enthusiasts looking for the best of the best.
Best Budget Monitor for Photo Editing
HP 24mh 23.8-Inch Display
- Excellent sRGB color coverage
- High contrast ratio for an IPS monitor
- DisplayPort, HDMI, and VGA connectors
- Stand supports height, pivot, and tilt adjustment
- Built-in 2-watt speakers
- Warranty limited to one year
- Brightness fell short of its rating
HP's 24mh IPS-based budget monitor is surprisingly feature-rich for its price, packing three inputs, a stand with ergonomic chops, and built-in speakers. Plus, the panel delivers a high contrast ratio and stellar sRGB color coverage for the money.
Best Docking Station Monitor for Photo Editing
Dell UltraSharp 27 4K USB-C Hub Monitor (U2723QE)
- IPS Black technology deepens black levels, improves contrast
- 4K resolution with sharp high-pixel-density image
- Extensive ergonomic features
- Dual DisplayPort connectors let you daisy-chain monitors
- Mini-joystick controller for OSD
- Pricey for a 27-inch monitor
- No webcam
It isn't cheap, but Dell's UltraSharp 27 4K USB-C Hub Monitor delivers loads of connection and adjustment choices, amping up an extra-poppy panel with wide color gamut and superb contrast.
Best Monitor for Photo Editing on a Mac
Apple Pro Display XDR
- Exceptional color accuracy.
- DisplayHDR 1600 looks incredible.
- High contrast ratio.
- Sturdy build.
- Beautiful design.
- Functionality with Windows in Boot Camp, or with specialized broadcast-workflow hardware.
- Super-expensive stand.
- No input alternatives to USB-C.
- Matte-panel version costs $1,000 more.
Apple's Pro Display XDR provides exceptional color accuracy and build quality at a price that's quite competitive with those of reference-grade pro monitors. It's exquisite enough that swallowing the wildly extravagant cost of its Pro Stand is worth it.
Best Monitor for Video Production and Photo Editing
BenQ PD3220U DesignVue Designer Monitor
- Good color accuracy.
- Ergonomic stand supports height, tilt, swivel, and pivot adjustment.
- Large screen.
- UHD (4K) resolution.
- Improved HotKey Puck controller.
- Built-in KVM switch.
- Does not cover the full Adobe RGB color space.
The BenQ PD3220U DesignVue Designer Monitor provides a winning combination of a large screen, UHD resolution, good color accuracy, and a host of convenience features as a professional monitor for designers, videographers, and photographers.
Best Portable Monitor for Photo Editing
ViewSonic ColorPro VP16-OLED Portable Monitor
- OLED panel in a portable monitor
- Wide color coverage, befitting its 10-bit color depth
- Excellent contrast and striking photo and video quality
- Flexible double-hinged stand
- Easy-to-navigate OSD
- Mediocre color accuracy for a pro monitor
ViewSonic's ColorPro VP16-OLED renders vivid colors and deep blacks befitting its OLED panel—the first we've seen on a portable monitor.
Best Interactive Pen Display for Photo Editing
Wacom Cintiq Pro 27
- Fantastic resolution and color
- Highly accurate stylus and screen interaction
- Useful customizable controls on both display and stylus
- Stylus ships with custom grips, replacement nibs
- Well-designed app
- Expensive, even without the stand
- Huge and heavy
The Wacom Cintiq Pro 27 is a best-in-class interactive display for digital artists and editors—the price may be sky-high, but it justifies the spend for pros tied to their pens.
Best Touch-Screen Desktop Monitor for Photo Editing
Alogic Clarity Pro Touch
- 27-inch touch screen
- 4K UHD resolution
- Full sRGB and Adobe RGB color coverage
- Contrast ratio considerably better than its rating
- 8-megapixel webcam
- On the pricey side for a display of its capabilities
- Poorly responsive control buttons
- Awkward, icon-based OSD menu system
The Alogic Clarity Pro Touch is a rare 27-inch 4K UHD monitor with 10-point gesture-based touch support, making it an excellent (albeit pricey) way to add a touch screen to your desktop setup.
Wide-gamut monitors, which let you select from a palette of more than a billion colors, are the cat's meow when it comes to photography, although it is important that they adequately cover the particular color space(s) that you will be using. If you're working with a 14-bit or 16-bit RAW file, you'll want to get a display that can show you the subtleties contained within each image you capture.
Nowadays, a digital connection such as DisplayPort, USB-C (typically carrying a DisplayPort signal), or Thunderbolt is standard, but you will want to match up your panel with the output of your PC or Mac. For most uses, you can look for a display with an in-plane switching (IPS) panel and at least an 8-bit lookup table (LUT); it will be able to pull images from a palate of 16.7 million colors. (More about IPS and screen types in the next section.) Moving to a top-end panel with a 10-bit LUT expands that number to more than a billion—generally speaking. To achieve that number, though, you'll need a high-end display designed for photographers, but be prepared to pay a premium.
Screen Technology: IPS Rules, But OLED Is Coming On Strong
Most LCD panels geared toward photographers and graphic artists use IPS technology, though we are beginning to see more organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels, which we discuss below. IPS has several advantages over other commonly used LCD hardware technologies such as twisted nematic (TN) and vertical alignment (VA). It offers wide viewing angles (up to 178 degrees for both vertical and horizontal); these are the maximum angular distance from looking in front of a screen to looking from the side (or above) without a change of brightness or shift in colors. IPS displays tend to have better viewing angles than VA panels, and much better ones than TN panels.
Also, IPS panels are known for having the most accurate colors of the three. IPS panels in monitors designed for creative professionals tend to have higher color depth (up to 10 bits; these are the panels that can choose from a palette of more than a billion colors) than most TN or VA displays, and support a wider color gamut, often covering all—or nearly all—of the DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB color spaces. VA panels may cover the sRGB space but not much more, and TN displays have even more limited color coverage.
While for the most part IPS panels rule the roost when it comes to photo editing, OLED monitors—which tend to be expensive but do well at displaying colors and have excellent contrast—are making inroads in the market, and in our list of recommended models.
OLED images look great—they achieve their superior contrast thanks to individual pixels that can turn wholly off, making the panels capable of true black and a theoretically infinite contrast ratio. OLED colors appear vivid and well saturated—a common complaint is that they look too good on the photo editor's screen, compared with what the average user with a mere-mortal monitor is likely to see!
One issue with OLED screens is that they can suffer burn-in from prolonged use if displaying a fixed screen or if a set of immobile menus or toolbars is left shining endlessly on them. You don't want to keep them turned on for days and weeks on end with static images or screen elements showing, unless the panel features an anti-burn-in technology (which might, for example, auto-shift pixels minimally to prevent burn-in).
How to Assess Color Spaces and Color Coverage
A color space is a defined range of colors. An important factor in evaluating a professional monitor to be used in photo editing is determining which specific color spaces you will be working in, and what percentage of colors in a given color space the monitor is capable of showing. Common color spaces cited in display manufacturers' specs include sRGB, Adobe RGB, DCI-P3, NTSC, and Rec.709. Photographers will be most interested in sRGB and Adobe RGB, as they were developed with photos and still images in mind.
First, though, a bit about the other, more cinema-oriented color spaces. Professional monitors are often calibrated for one or more of these spaces in addition to sRGB and (in some cases) Adobe RGB, and creative artists may work with video as well as photos. DCI-P3 was defined by the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), a consortium of major motion-picture producers. It is geared toward digital video projection. NTSC, developed by the National Television Standards Committee (NTSC), covers a gamut similar to Adobe RGB. And Rec.709, a standard for HDTV, is widely used in video projects. Its color space is identical to that of sRGB; the difference is in their tone response curves (aka gamma) to account for differences in ambient light. (TVs tend to be used in darker settings, while computer monitors are often set up and used in brighter rooms.)
Most professional monitors have dedicated picture modes—accessible through the panel's on-screen display (OSD)—for sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3, and we test their color coverage in all three modes. If you are purely a photographer or a photo editor, you can ignore the DCI-P3 results, but they will come into play if you work with video.
Whether you primarily use sRGB or Adobe RGB depends on how you show your photos to the world. If your images are all to be posted online, a monitor that displays the full sRGB color spectrum is fine. sRGB is the standard color space for the web and many other applications. Even though Adobe RGB has a wider range of possible colors—sRGB encompasses only about 70% of the Adobe RGB gamut—websites will not be able to display the additional colors. What's more, if you do upload art saved in Adobe RGB to the web, it will be automatically converted to sRGB, with the colors often looking duller than if you had shot it or saved it to sRGB in the first place.
That said, Adobe RGB does have a considerably wider color gamut than sRGB, and savvy photographers may be able to coax a more vivid range of colors when printing Adobe RGB images, whether they're outputting their own prints or working with a commercial service. They will want a monitor that will display them to full advantage. Many monitors cover both bases, touting near-100% coverage for both sRGB and Adobe RGB. With those monitors, if you need to switch color spaces, you simply change the mode via the OSD.
Understanding Color Accuracy
A monitor's color accuracy—how close a displayed color looks to the way it is intended—is determined by a measurement known as Delta E (dE, for short). It represents the difference between the hue of a displayed color and the input that the monitor received. The dE figure that appears in monitor specs—reflecting dE2000, the current standard—is the average of a large number of individual color readings from across the spectrum. The lower the value, the more accurate the color. You don't necessarily need the best monitor for color accuracy in every respect, but you want one that excels in the specific color spaces that make sense for your photo work.
Most professional monitors come pre-calibrated with a dE of less than 2 for sRGB, and often for Adobe RGB as well. Depending on the colors involved, a dE of less than 2 would be hard for an untrained observer to discern, while a dE of less than 1 would be imperceptible to most anyone without specialized measuring equipment.
In evaluating professional monitors, we use the ColorChecker function in Portrait Displays' Calman 5 color calibration program to measure the dE for a given color space. Below is an example of the results.
The chromaticity chart on its right shows the position of the individual color measurements, while the bar chart at far left depicts the Delta E for each point. All of the bars are short, with no points more than 2 and many less than 1. Below that chart are the figures for the average and maximum dE; the average dE of 0.88 for this monitor is excellent, i.e., it passed with flying colors (so to speak).
A Bit About Calibration Tools
A few professional displays have built-in calibration tools, and some will ship with an external colorimeter that you drape over the monitor to calibrate it. The latter, typically, shows a series of color patches and uses software to create an ICC profile to properly adjust colors.
When that hardware is combined with a separate ICC profile for your printer and paper type, you can use soft proofing tools, like those found in Adobe Lightroom, on your display to see how your prints will look on paper. If your LCD doesn't ship with a calibration tool, consider getting a Datacolor Spyder or an X-Rite i1 calibrator. You'll want to calibrate your monitor at least once every 30 days—be sure to check out our guide to monitor calibration.
What Kind of Finish Should I Get in a Photo Editing Monitor?
Matte displays have an anti-glare coating. They can be calibrated more accurately, and they tend to show a truer image versus the more popular high-gloss displays, which give colors an oversaturated look. Plus, you won't have to deal with as many reflections. Fortunately, you can find many monitors with anti-glare screens to choose from.
Depending on your work environment and just how critical your work is, you also might consider a display with a hood. A hood will block ambient light that comes at your display from the sides and top, so you won't have to worry about light, say, coming in from a window affecting how your display looks at different points in the day.
You can find third-party generic hoods for notebooks and for the iMac, but for the best fit, you're better off opting for a display that has a dedicated hood from the manufacturer included, or available as an accessory. Fortunately, many professional monitors do.
Ergonomic Features to Look For
Most professional monitors have stands that support some combination of the standard ergonomic comfort features: height, tilt, swivel, and pivot control.
Pivot control lets you rotate a monitor 90 degrees on its stand joint, from landscape up into portrait mode, and back. It's handy if you tend to work with photos in this kind of vertical orientation.
Pivot control also offers a surprise fringe benefit, in that when you swing the monitor up into its portrait orientation, it makes it easy to access the ports. On many displays of this kind, the ports are downward-facing in back and would otherwise be hard to reach, particularly considering that some photo-centric monitors are on the large and heavy side.
Do You Need a 4K Monitor for Photo Editing? Size and Resolution
Go with as big a display as your workspace and budget can afford, and one with an appropriately dense resolution. Remember that a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel monitor is only 2 megapixels—if you're shooting with a 20-megapixel SLR, that's nothing. Thankfully, this will come naturally when looking for one that hits the other features. Most 27-inch models suited for graphical work feature at least a 2,560-by-1,440-pixel native resolution, but 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) models are now widely available.
Also, keep in mind that pixel density—how closely the pixels are spaced, as measured in pixels per inch (ppi)—is an important factor in determining how sharp a monitor's displayed image will look. For a given resolution, the larger the screen size, the lower the pixel density will be. We recommend that a monitor used for photo editing have a pixel density of at least 100ppi. As an extreme example, with a 32-inch screen and "6K" (6,016-by-3,384-pixel) native resolution, the Apple Pro Display XDR has a phenomenal pixel density of 216ppi. Of course, monitors with such ultra-high resolutions have rarified prices, as well.
Depending on your workflow and desk space, you may want to consider a secondary display, too, regardless of what you choose as your primary LCD. iMac users, for example, can load up the majority of Lightroom's tools on the 24-inch iMac's glossy display to browse through catalogs and make adjustments, while viewing a full-screen version of the image they're working on using the second monitor, or vice versa. But we wouldn't go smaller than 24 inches in that scenario.
Ready to Buy the Right Monitor for Photo Editing?
In addition to the pros and cons of our top picks, this guide also includes a detailed spec breakout of each one to help make your decision even easier. Those are the high points—obviously you'll want to read some reviews in detail before investing in a display for your personal photography work or business. Our pick list is a perfect place to start.
