Why You Need a Factory-Calibrated Monitor

Accurate colour performance is what a designer expects from any professional monitor they use. However, not every professional monitor actually provides it. With factory calibration, designers make full use of colour accuracy on a monitor. Let’s find out what factory calibration is and why a factory-calibrated monitor stands as a top priority for image professionals around the world.

Factory calibration, as the term suggests, is the calibration process conducted in the factory itself, before each individual monitor ships. What’s calibrated depends on the manufacturer, but meticulous calibration requires doing so unit by unit and includes brightness, gamma, colour temperature, and uniformity on the panel, and most importantly, preset colour modes or spaces such as sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3. These factory presets are stored in dedicated memory and can only be accessed by equipment in the factory and by the manufacturer personnel. Only when this is executed with carefully calibrated equipment and well-trained team members can factory calibration be conducted in a stringent enough manner to count as genuinely professional.

Therefore, only lab-grade colour calibration in the factory ensures accurate colour performance on displays.

It’s easy to see if your monitor is pre-calibrated. If the monitor ships with a factory calibration report, then it is. This report shows that this monitor has succeeded in passing a series of meticulous and stringent testing processes and its colour performance has been verified. Users can thus benefit from its out-of-the-box colour accuracy with no need to do first-use calibration. If your monitor is equipped with ICCsync, a unique feature on BenQ DesignVue monitors, you can use the colour mode syncing feature for immediate colour adjustments on your monitor. ICCsync switches between different colour modes without lengthy, multi-step loading of your ICC profile to your monitor.

If a factory-calibrated monitor guarantees accurate colour performance, does it need recalibration at any point? The answer is to make sure what kind of monitor you have and check if it can be hardware or software calibrated. You can apply hardware calibration to monitors that offer colour gamut transformation functionality, or you can do software calibration to your monitor. There’s one thing to note, as software calibration does not deal with colour gamut. This means ICC profiles play an important role in syncing the colour gamut of your laptop/PC and monitor for consistent colour representation on both displays.

But if hardware calibration is your priority, get a professional monitor that can be hardware calibrated. The BenQ PhotoVue series is a good choice.

In a word, pre-calibrated monitors offer out-of-the-box color accuracy as they are factory calibrated through meticulous testing processes and are shipped with guaranteed accurate color performance. With ICCsync, it’s easy to have your monitor display the corresponding color profile whether you are using a PC, MacBook Pro^®, or Mac mini^®. Designers can thus access the desired color mode with just a few clicks. There’s also the specially designed M-Book mode, which replicates colors from your Mac^® laptop on your BenQ DesignVue monitor, making it perfect for your artistic creations.