Why You Need a Factory-Calibrated Monitor

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, color temperature, and uniformity on the panel, and most importantly, preset color 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 color calibration in the factory ensures accurate color performance on displays.

If a factory-calibrated monitor guarantees accurate color 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 color 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 color gamut. This means ICC profiles play an important role in syncing the color gamut of your laptop/PC and monitor for consistent color 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.