It depends on how serious you are in terms of the photographs you want to look at. The quality of the screen will determine the rendition of the colours and the sharpness of the image. I am a pretty serious amateur snapper and use a Mac mini with a Benq Pd2700U.
This is a 27” as you might guess and gives 4K, The iMac is 5k but in reality you won’t notice the difference. This Benq also displays in sRGB. This is one of the standard colour gamuts (the array of colours) and is the one most widely used in printing, magazines and studio work. Adobe, the people who produce Photoshop and Lightroom, use a wider gamut, Adobe RGB and Apple have another very similar. There is a view that the wider the gamut the better, but again the difference is marginal. But if I were to process in AdobeRGB and then send images off for printing in a studio they would print in sRGB. So in realty sRGB will do you fine.
If you have a Mac Air with the new M1 chip then you already have a very fine machine for photo work and hooking up to a quality monitor would enable you to take photos in RAW, unprocessed format with all the data, rather than much more compressed jpg where the camera makes the decision about the final appearance of the images, compresses it and loses the data that would otherwise be used to process the image. Of course you may not want to do that, but a good quality monitor keeps your options open. You would only need a photo processing programme to have the full kit. With most there is a fairish learning curve, but DXO Photolab is one of the easier ones to use and is not on a subscription plan, you buy it once and upgrade at your discretion.
The other issue with displays is the ability to calibrate them. This means you “tune” the monitor to give true colour reproduction so that your two screens and any prints you make are as close as possible. I have a gadget to enable me to check my screen from time to time. Benq screens come pre-calibrated.
In terms of cost I paid around £435 for mine, an AdobeRGB would be perhaps £700+ And of course an Apple monitor much more. There are cheaper, and inevitably lower spec, monitors available but before you decide think that the screen is the window to everything you will see for a very long time. Take a look on the internet and you will see plenty of reviews of monitors for photo work. A quick look suggests a Dell for £175 and a 27” 2k 100% sRGB ASU’s for £350.
Sorry, you got the full nerd treatment here!
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