Cant get my calibration right (NEC 2490 rev1)

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psyside

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I tried 3 different profiles, they all end up with very low contrast, around 300 or to strong whites.

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Anyone please tell me what values/settings to use in Spectraview options in order to get best contrast and general picture clarity? i'm average user, who use his pc for movies-gaming etc, no professional work.
 
Stop setting your intensity so slow. There's only so low the display can go through reducing backlight, somewhere in the 80-90 nit range. Below that, it has to use panel blocking and thus you lose contrast.
 
Thanks for the fast answer! but i still dont really understand man, can you go to each of the settings in tell me exactly what to put? in order to get best contrast/image clarity?

BTW i did not set the intensity...it was on defaults or i messed up something maybe lol!

Also what profile to use for my needs? Digital cinema? photo editing? thanks again.
 
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Under Edit > Preferences > Calibration make sure "maximize contrast ratio" is selected. Only photogs care that their lowest blacks are the proper color temperature, and this brings up black level unfortunately. Judging from the look of things, that's not your issue as 0.16cdm/2 for these screens is very good.

Create a custom profile. Use either 2.2 Gamma or select "Custom Gamma curve" and set it to sRGB. If it's for gaming sRGB will bring up darker tones a bit for those darker games.

For intensity select something between 140 cdm/2 to 160 cdm/2 depending on if you use it in bright conditions. The higher the number the brighter the display.

You can leave your white point native because it looks pretty close to D65 anyways, and not changing it will also maximize contrast.
 
Thanks! will report back, the screen is now to dark at 300 contrast, and this settings.

Also should i reset to factory defaults before calibration just to make sure or maybe lower the brightness.....or i can set it after the calibration is done maybe, will this destroy my calibration? thanks one more time.
 
Resetting the screen to factory "presets" will remove any calibration and return white point, brightness and everything else to factory.

If you are going to do it, do it prior to calibrating. That "Digital Cinema" preset blows by the way :)
 
lol your right, i just tried Photo editing (pre-build profile) and its alot better then DC, here are the results, i guess this is good enough?

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Also after altering brightness, when the calibration of one custom profile was done, after i turned on the SVII again, it said monitor settings have been change, do you want to restore, i pressed no, and in the status it chaged from calibrated to uncalibrated, does this means i should not touch the brigtness level at all after the process of calibration is done? thanks one more time.

P.S. How to achieve higher contrast, is this results good enough regarding contrast? what i notice now with photo editing profile, white color/level is amazingly good- its snow white.
 
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EDIT & bump,

I noticed i got the very high delta for calibrated unit, users with this unit/calibration kit usually get around 0.3/0.5 as max...i got 1.36? also the screen is a bit bright, i used it at 23% before, now the SVII set it up to 40% after the calibration ends :(

Any additional tips will be helpful, thanks guys!
 
That second result looks good to me. These things don't have extremely high contrast numbers. IPS never does and older IPS less so. 500+ is about all you can expect. Also the i1Display 2 isn't that great at low light measurement, so it doesn't always get that accurate a report.

The Delta E values are fine.

Don't touch brightness after calibration, when you calibrate the thing, you don't touch any of the controls. If it is too bright, back off the brightness to 120 nits and recalibrate, see how that is. Also just look at having a bit more light in your room.
 
Thanks for the input dude, but i don't get it, how come i got 0.63 delta in the first test, and in the second 1.36? does other settings of the calibration effect the delta?

maybe its better the lower the brightness before the calibration? or maybe restart to factory defaults, and then put intensity to 120 and then start over?

P.S. my unit is quite close to window, and its early summer here, sunny day, how much light do you consider enough>? (duh i know its hard to explain this lol)
 
You should be able to get a bit more than that. Also when new, the monitor applies panel blocking, if the brightness of white is at ~140 nits or lower. As the monitor ages, the brightness also becomes lower.
In order to achieve the lowest black settings, i'd set the monitor in "native" mode (setting N), set the brightess to 0% and display a white image, and measure the luminance of this. This measurement should be the target intensity set in Edit -> Target..." SpectraView.

How old is the calibration sensor and how was it stored?

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gradient.php - do these gray scale images look free from color tinting after calibration ? How do they appear in native preset mode?
 
I know its stupid to post pick of this but oh well.

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The sensor is old as the monitor, around 2.5 years, i keep it in antistatic foil with soft cloth under it, in box.
 
That is a screenshot, right? It doesn't show how the monitor displays the image, since it is just a copy of what the video card sends (basically). The only option would be to use a camera and take a picture of the monitor.
The best judge is probably your own eyes. Color tints in black/white/greyscales are relatively easy to spot. :)
 
Bump, any more input? this are my last calibration results, still now satisfied with contrast level and Delta E.

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Ok the problem is that you are playing the numbers game. You are looking at numbers and getting the "moar is bettar!" attitude and thus not being satisfied with what you have. That's silly. Does the display look good? That's all that matters.

Plus you are taking the numbers without any reference. So for Delta E anything under 3 is good enough for print matching because it is at the point of "people can't tell the difference". When you are down near 1 you are talking as good as you are going to get, particularly with the kind of equipment you are using. So stop worrying. Most displays have colours that are 10dE or worse off out of box.

For contrast ratio, I hate that number because people fixate on it as a "goodness" number without understanding. The first thing to understand is that we shouldn't really measure it in terms of X:1. Humans don't see in linear space, we see in logarithms, just like we hear. So really we should represent CR in terms of decibels. So 571:1 would be better expressed as 27.6dB of contrast. Now say you could increase it to 700:1, what would that be? Answer: 28.5dB. In other words, barely noticeable (1dB is about the minimum change a human can perceive). Changes in CR don't matter much unless they are pretty large.

Also it just isn't as big a deal as people want to pretend. Go to a theatre, the CR there? About 500:1. That look ok to you? Then don't worry about it on you monitor. Particularly when there's some light in the room and so on your effective CR, due to reflection off the screen and so on, won't be much more than that anyhow. Unless you are unhappy with the image, it just doesn't matter.

You also have to understand that this is pretty normal for these displays. They are NOT high contrast displays. These things were only 800:1 on paper and in actual operation you rarely see them past 700:1. As I said with the dB chart, these are small changes. Mine, a 2690, measures about 595:1. You want big contrast numbers, you need a PVA display. Even NEC's newer IPS displays don't get much better, they are only 1000:1 on paper.

Then there's the fact that if you want better measurements, you probably have to get a better sensor. All sensors have errors, and those errors reflect in the measurement. The i1Display 2 you have is a fine budget calibrator. It is one of the all time popular ones because it does a good job for around $200. However it isn't that great of a unit in absolute terms. It's low level light measurements (which contribute to errors in CR, and dE) aren't great. If you bought a better meter, you'd probably see your numbers improve. The image might well be precisely the same, because nothing has changed except the accuracy and precision you measure with.

When I got an i1Display Pro I saw my dE drop and my CR rise. As far as I can tell nothing looks different, it is just that the new model is more accurate with low light measurements (and other things). One thing I did notice was that the CR measurement is much less variable now. With the i1d2 it would jump around quite a bit calibration to calibration, reflecting the meter's difficulty in accurately measuring the black point. The i1d3 is much more accurate, and so the measurement is closer to the same each time. I'd get an even more accurate measurement if I bought an X-Rite Hubble.

Finally, understand what you have. You have an older display and sensor, based on the usage numbers and the sensor particularly is not ultra high end and suffers with age. The colorimeters that have their sensors exposed directly as the i1d2 does degrade more with age than others, but all of them change and need to be recalibrated for best performance. Your display is performing as expected, don't worry about it. If you have a need for better numbers, get yourself a PA241W and an i1Display Pro. Their numbers will be better on account of:

1) Being newer. Things do degrade with age.

2) Having 3D LUTs, the PA series can be dialed in more accurately.

3) A better sensor that can take more accurate measurements.

If you don't feel like blowing $1300, I don't blame you. In that case be happy with what you have, it is a great display.
 
Thanks for the awesome answer! im aware that i get alot into details, i'm fine with this contrast levels etc after this post of yours, but why i'm getting so low black details? before i could tell everything in the dark parts of the movies, now look at the pictures, this is big deal for me and not just a number metrics.

For example. the exact jacket which the actress wear on this picture, i could see it clear in almost all other episodes of the show, i could see the pockets, everything in the dark parts, so there is defo something wrong about it, same goes for the pictures of the guy.....and i don't understand why....i originaly bought my display mainly for this reason, to get great details in the dark parts of the movies/games (no PVA black crush/gamma shift etc) and i did had it! it was awesome, i could clearly see almost everything but now....:(

Can you please give me an idea what could be wrong? what settings can affect the shadow/black detail so much? :(
 
For that you can either up the brightness or better is use a different gamma curve. I personally use the L* curve. It is a perceptually uniform gamma curve that matches the way we see. It ramps up low levels faster and hence you get more shadow detail, then the curve slows so it doesn't blow out highlights. You can google for the details of the curve if you like. If you pick a custom curve, L* is one of the options under there.
 
I ended up using this settings, and im satisfied with the results! the lagom contrast test now show all of the fileds, from first to last, before the first square was almost impossible to see, now there is clear difference!

The Settings,

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The result? in movies? now i can see things better regarding darker tones - shadow details - in the dark parts of the movies! thanks all for the help! : even the Delta E is at alot better 0.6 instead of 1.3 :)

P.S.The auto luminance should be off for general usage, it does makes things darker and harder to see, that and using SRGB curve, made all of the difference imho.
 
More advanced gamma curves are the way to go, for hardware that supports it. The 2.2 power curve is just popular because it is a simple mathematical ratio, not because it models human vision. As I said, I prefer L* since it is actually modeled after human vision, but the sRGB curve does a similar thing in terms of having a linear transfer function at the low end.

Only thing to note is you may notice more low end artifacts (macroblocks and so on) in video. Video counts on you not being able to have a lot of fidelity in those lower colours, since 2.2 is the ATSC gamma spec, and thus doesn't spend the bits on trying to make them all smooth. Fair tradeoff in my opinion, particularly when you game since it means no more having to muck about with trying to see things in dark sections.
 
Thanks again Sycraft, i will take into consideration your recommendations in future, for now i'm to scared to use any other settings because i already did like 15 calibrations in 2 days lol!

You have been very helpful and i appreciated it!
 
Ok, so after some time, i decided to re-calibrate, and the results are not quite good imo.


What i dont like? the brightness is to high for my liking, and also the contrast is kinda low for 130 CD/m2 setting, and 54% brightness after calibration.

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Colorcomp is off btw.

What i would love to get, is higher contrast or same, but with lower brightness around 30% best white level, and black shadow detail....

How to achieve that?

P.S. The calibration was made in dark room, don't know how this affect it.
 
Can't you simply set your own target brightness when calibrating?

As for contrast, at close to 20K hours, I'm not sure that's considered really unusually low for that model. I think at best it'll get 700:1ish and that's when it's not so elderly.
 
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