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Clearing up the NEC Spectraview confusion
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Last Updated
19th of March, 2012
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NEC is a very large electronics company and unfortunately they have created some cross market confusion with differing use of the SpectraView label in different countries.

Executive Summary: In Australia the best combination of quality, convenience and price is to buy an NEC PA Series monitor and combine it with NEC's SpectraView 2 software.  This gives you all the performance & quality of the PA series with fantastic, easy to use direct hardware calibration. 

In more detail, there are three aspects to the SpectraView label.

1. (And the most important!) - The SpectraView Engine is the colour engine built into the NEC PA Series monitors - with the 14 BIT 3D LUTs.  This is the critical hardware behind the SpectraView system.  ALL PA series monitors have this hardware.

2. Direct Hardware Calibration - With all the older NEC Multisync monitors and with the new PA Series monitors, to really use the SpectraView hardware engine to its full potential, you need software that allows you to directly manipulate this hardware and perform direct hardware calibration.  The main and best option for this is NEC SpectraView 2 (which comes from the US) and has a nice modern interface, and is regularly updated.  The older multisync SpectraView monitors came with SpectraView Profiler (which is a relabeled European product).  You can still technically use this with the newer monitors, but having used both extensively (and competing products from Eizo etc.), we feel there's no doubt SpectraView 2 is the better solution - being easier, and faster to use by a significant margin.

3. Panel Quality/Certification - this is where it gets a little confusing.  In the US, there is no certification program and all NEC PA monitors get calibrated with SpectraView 2 - if you see the US colour experts talking about NEC monitors and SpectraView calibration, this is what they're talking about.  People like Andrew Rodney, Jeff Schewe etc - the people who literally write the books on colour management, Photoshop and Lightroom etc.  This is the model that NEC Australia have moved to, and if it's good enough for the people who make their living from colour, it's good enough for the rest of us!   In Australia, only one line of stock comes in and thus there is no practical difference (except for about $1000 extra on the price tag) - between the SpectraView PA Series and the SpectraView Reference PA Series.

For further information regarding Spectraview II, take a look at the FAQ section on the NEC website.
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