As the title states, our biggest problem (me and Kristina both lack somewhat in the hardware department here) at the moment is owning good monitors to do our digital processing on.
We photograph mainly as a hobby and for our own needs, but we both see the creative process and the accurate representation of the images made fairly critical. Kristina is a sheer perfectionist, and we both have vision accurate enough to discern some serious problems with the hardware we currently use.
We bought a Spyder X for calibration of the monitors we use, but those monitors are a wild bunch to say the least.
We use 2 BenQ office monitors, each a notebook display, and Kristina uses a Wacom Cintiq 16.
Rather then helping, the Spyder X showed the real cause of our problems. The monitors we use show a wide variety of color accuracy, ranging from 60% Adobe RGB (the Acer laptop screen) through to around 85% Adobe RGB (The Wacom tablet)
Another problem is that, after calibration, white balance and color temperature on the 3 connected screens looks very different from monitor to monitor.
Even though our budget is small, I hope to get some advise on a set of monitors (around $300 each, with a small margin up) that could get us in the 90%+ Adobe RGB range. Monitors should be small, to ensure a small footprint (no bigger then 24") to save valuable desk space (try to fit 3 screens and 2 laptops, and a pair of cameras on a desk to get a visual of how our desk space looks when processing. 27" really isn't an option)
