Colorimeter advice for the casual user?

icor1031 said:

Does colormunki work with dispcal?


I already own an i1display pro, and I calibrated it using dispcal. The software it came with made it turn out worse than default, but with dispcal it was a huge improvement over what I could after spending several hours with lagom and NVCP.

It's worth the investment, if you have good monitors / or spend a lot of time on the PC / etc.

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Yes it works, dispcal seems to consider them the same device.
Otherwise same experience as you with the bundled software.

Seems to work fine when playing in windowed fullscreen at least.

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A display ICC profile that was created during a software calibration consists of two parts - a colorimetric description of the actual behaviour of your display and linearization data for the videocard LUT that is loaded during system start. Games don't implement a color management - so it's only about keeping the LUT data persistent.

Which profile type is best, or is it a matter of weighing drawbacks of each kind (is either type more resource intensive?), or does it simply vary by panel type, monitor model etc?

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Displays behave quite linear. If a simple shaper/matrix profile is not sufficient to describe its characteristic - especially after calibration - you shouldn't use it for color critical work. This doesn't mean that using a LUT profile is wrong - however a shaper/matrix profile won't be a limitation in most cases.

I was already using the 2.4 preset on the monitor with my manual settings, since subjectively it looked better than the 2.2. All the people calibrating for 2.2 gamma are hobby content creators, or just doing it wrong?

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As long as the actual display characteristic is recorded in its assigned profile you will get a reproduction corresponding to the source characteristic in color aware software - independent from the tonal curve chosen during calibration. If the black level is reflected in the profile a CMM can even perform a black point compensation to account for the limited black level of real devices (this factor can be be also taken into consideration during calibration).

If the display provides control over the tonal curve ("gamma") you should choose a characteristic that corresponds best with your preferred working color space or softproof conditions. Generally a gamma 2.2 or sRGB characteristic is a good choice that also correlates with material usually used in non color aware software. Apart from the considerations mentioned above choosing an other target may be useful to account for certain environmental conditions (bright vs. dark room) - but keep the first paragraph in mind (regarding color aware software).