Good advice. My TV sometimes goes into a screensaver mode with some of my shots but they are distinctly different than on my editing monitor, as printed, or as others see them online. The question here seems to be: would you recommend that anyone use a TV as a primary editing monitor (or even just for sorting and selecting images)?

I would not, and particularly not for a beginner as it would be a barrier to progression.

TVs are set up to stand out in a showroom with lots of contrast and vivid colours. There are lots of videofile sites that describe how to tone this down for more realistic viewing but even that is a long way from a setup such that images edited on them would have the final look reproduced in print or on anyone else's screen. You might say that it is just for your use, but that isn't forever and the longer you work with a TV, the more you will have to re-do images later and the less skill you will build up in selecting and editing colour and contrast.

Not sure about this Sirui but the Manfrotto 234c can hold a lot more than six pounds. I have my 400 f/2.8L IS I and a 1D MkIV on that thing all the time and it has no problems. And I use the Manfrotto PL-200 Quick Release Plates ($10 on Ebay) to hold it with no worries at all. I toss that thing over my shoulder and run all over creation at field sporting events and have never had one little problem. I don't get spending big bucks for Arca Swiss ya ya boom bah whatever when these plates could hold anything you can with your arms... A good Ball-head on your tripod yes but people go totally nuts over their mounting plates, IMHO :mrgreen:

OK guys not to start a big fight but I simply had to do this. I read Jerryc41's post a while back where he compared his images with and without a protective filter and I was a bit shocked. I have been a photographer for over 25 years and I have tried pretty much all of the major flavors of filters and have recently, after some serious research, switched out everything for Hoya HD series filters. I do choose to use a protective filter since my work takes me to some nasty places to take pic's and I have, on many occasions, had the end of a lens saved by a simple filter. Now you can fume and fuss all you like and toss out things like using a lens cap or a lens hood and I will counter that I can't because I shoot sports and you need to be ready at the blink of an eye and I do use lens hoods at all times but that won't change your mind and you certainly are not going to change mine so we should agree to disagree and to each his own. All that aside if my images are being seriously effected I don't want them on there. I have tested this and I have never seen a detectable difference but Jerry's images did get me wondering so I did my own simple test.

To test I took two images a few seconds apart first with and then without the filter. Aside from the filter there was no changes to anything else. I simply placed my Canon 5d MkII on my tripod and attached a 16-35mm f/2.8L II lens set to 35mm. I set the ISO to 100, the aperture to f/22 and the shutter to 1/30's for a proper exposure all manual of course. I focused on infinity, locked the mirror up and fired with a wireless remote for good sharpness. I shot in RAW as well as .jpg Large Fine and compared the images straight out of the camera in Lightroom 4.3 with zero PP. I blew the images up to a 100% crop and did a side-by-side comparison of the two images on my Eizo 27" IPS Monitor which is very high resolution and could not see any difference. In fact if I somehow mixed the two up I would not be able to tell which was which. Here they are in the .jpg format, we'll see if they post as they appear on my computer monitor, what do you guys think?