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Not to my knowledge. Anyway: As continuous recalibration is recommended you will automatically monitor the brightness development - although I see no real problems in your case.
A good tool but not what he wanted to achieve.
No. As I said: Corrections with the help of the 8bit videocard LUT are lossy. If you want to avoid any loss of tonal values in unmanaged applications: Don't calibrate the screen but only choose the "Profiling" option. The Eizo is quite neutral but I wouldn't generally recommend this approach.
You can lower the contrast through raising the desired blacklevel or lowering whitelevel. There's no way of raising the contrast over the native limit of the screen. But all this isn't connected to your observation.
As already mentioned: A profile validation has quite limited expressiveness and a narrow application area. Regarding that the UDACT you can run gives a far better impression as it incorporates an extensive profile validation, grey axis analysis (including the important chroma difference) and measurement of the ugra/ fogra media wedge. Btw: You can run it with every calibration aim. You don't have to use the ugra recommendations which aim at ISO Coated softproofing (therefore the gamma 1.8 gradation).
That won't lead to a better contrast as whitelevel will be quite ideal in default setting. Higher settings will just show an increasing white crush.
I can't follow this step? Which setting do you mean? The RGB gains are default @100 and can (meaningfully) only be lowered.
There are many (freeware) tools for gamut comparisons in Lab. You could also send me your profile for a deeper look.
I'm quite confused because you wrote:
This would be typical for some videocard LUT corrections - as long as you mean slight banding in gradients. There can also occur some visual "shifting" when the desired gradation doesn't match the gradation of the display prior to calibration very well.
It shows you your video lut curve. Refresh reads the video lut again. Reset will linearize the video lut.
If 2) in my previous post is your problem, iColor could be producing black crush with such a low black level. Raising the target black level may prevent that from happening.
Even if it is loading properly, unless the ICC profile is installed properly for your monitor, it would do absolutely nothing. After doing the above tests with Calibration Tester, you should be able to determine what is happening.
It doesn't "load" the ICC profile but the corrections for the videocard LUT (that are saved within the profile). There are sometimes problems with those external loaders in Windows 7 at startup. Solution would be to use the Windows 7 LUT loader or to click at the iColor LUT loader manually after startup.
Your blacklevel shouldn't create the problem. First it would be interesting to know how the gradation exactly is prior to calibration. You can use the UDACT for this task. Throw away any ICC profile, restart the computer and choose "Profilation" in iColor. After having saved this profile (that doesn't contain any LUT corrections) you can run the UDACT test (you can't run it without profilation because of license constraints). Post the result here.
I have tryed raising the minimum black level to 0.20 in iColor, doing that let me see the complete words QUALITY CONTROL (keep in mind that the final L is a mere #010101), so no grey tones were lost but the image is visibly worse. I'm used to work at about 0.12cd/m2, 0.20cd/m2 creates horrible images on my monitor, black isn't black enough for this monitor. When you seen 0.12cd/m2, higher black level is really a punch in the eye
If you want to find out if this is a monitor limitation or an iColor limitation, download DispcalGUI and Argyll CMS. Set DispcalGUI as follows:
Run 'Calibration Only', leave things as-is hitting '7' to start, and see what the results are (this takes awhile to complete). If it eliminates the loss of tones in the 'Quality Control' image in a non-color managed environment, then what you're seeing is an iColor issue. Unfortunately you need a correction matrix for your wide-gamut monitor, so unless you have access to a Eye-One Pro or Color Munki to create a correction matrix for the DTP94, you shouldn't use DispcalGUI normally.
As your UDACT test shows, near black your gamma is ~1.8. iColor needs to darken your near-black tones from 1.8 gamma to your target of 2.2 gamma, and this is resulting in loss of shadow detail. Either your monitor does a poor job reproducing shadow detail with a low black point and 2.2 gamma (while perfectly fine at it's native near-black gamma of 1.8 gamma), or iColor isn't doing a very good job maintaining tone separation at low black levels.
Don't have time to read through all posts but in short: The UDACT shows a native gradation (@ 2.2 setting via OSD) that goes in the direction of sRGB. Therefore the LUT corrections to accomplished to achieve a gradation with a fixed gamma of 2.2 will lead to darker tonal values in the lowest region in comparison. In color managed applications you will get the gradation of the source material (you can see this when opening the test picture in Photoshop and assigning the sRGB working color space profile if not already assigned). What you can do (this will decrease a loss of tonal values during calibration too in your case) is to calibrate with the sRGB gradation.
That also shows ~ a sRGB gradation instead of a fixed gamma of 2.2. That's why you can see the dark values well.
Don't raise the blacklevel and calibrate with the sRGB gradation out of iColor Display.
Hmm, do you still get a color cast in those tones if you disable the DTP94 wide-gamut correction matrix in iColor? It wouldn't be the first time I've heard of a wide-gamut correction matrix loosing accuracy near-black. It's very possible that the DTP94 may not need a correction matrix at very low black levels/tones, and the correction matrix is just making things worse (creating your strong red color cast).
As he can't achieve the gamma 2.2 gradation via OSD controls I would call this a "zero sum game" regarding a loss of tonal values when working in color managed applications. If ensuring the gradation via videocard LUT (theoretical exception: higher accuracy and dithering) the loss will occur on OS level otherwise through transformations of the CMM (which can be coupled with dithering too). Anyway: The loss of tonal values is not very big in this case - and because his screen is quite neutral out of the box all corrections together will still be small.
Hi dear Albo, not to diminish you but I would like to have a more "informative" answer than this
a sensational news
Probably I'm not able to use iColor but now it seems that all is ok, correct me if I'm wrong.
Usually to calibrate for 6500K, 2.2, 120cd/m2, I used the AdobeRGB preset or the sRGB preset.
Now I have manually setup the iColor without using presets, I selected custom instead of a preset and manually selected 6500K, 2.2 gamma, 120cd/m2 and than selected the black level to "deepest black level" instead of the automatic choose "Personalized: 0.0"
Now the image is really better than before, I have got deep black with absolutely no loosing in grey tones, at least my eye don't see any loss in grey tones, also #010101 is visible without any color shift, QUALITY CONTROL is fully displayed as I would like to.
I think that this is the best setting I can find for my monitor, this is the latest UDACT.
http://www.dpsoftware.org/host/udact_manual_2.2_deepest_black_level.pdf
I think that I can't do better on my monitor. Now I'm totally satisfied.
Can I do better?