Colour calibration tool?

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Can anyone tell me what the best colour calibration tool is? I have a Dell FSW2005 and want to make it look as good as possible.
 
BillR said:
Did you even read the web site?????

Try the top part where it says “Learning”
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Actually yes I did, but other than the marketing benefits, I'm still not sure what it does. I was looking for your personal experience since you claimed the results would be "shocking"
 
I have a Colorvision Spyder Plus since I do alot a photo work and it's crucial that my output matches what I do on screen. It's a little pricey (approx $280 since it does printer color calibration as well). You can get a screen only basic hardware version for under 100 if you need TRUE color correction not just eyeballing it which is never close.
 
Slider19 said:
Actually yes I did, but other than the marketing benefits, I'm still not sure what it does. I was looking for your personal experience since you claimed the results would be "shocking"
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Instead of the basic black, white and gamma levels the machine actually make your colors the color they are supposed to be. About half the problems I see with either LCD or CRT monitors is they don’t even come close to producing accurate color.

This little machine actually looks at your screen and while the software runs it reads what color it’s seeing based on what color the software is actually producing and makes the appropriate adjustments.

No monitor you buy at any price is even close to color correct. You don’t need the big one unless you are doing photo work and want to calibrate your printer as well.

As a side benefit properly set up colors smear less in games as well, not to mention your eyes will love you for the sudden burst of reality you will suddenly see.

If your going to spend a grand for a monitor $200 to make it right doesn’t seem out of line to me.
 
BillR said:
Instead of the basic black, white and gamma levels the machine actually make your colors the color they are supposed to be. About half the problems I see with either LCD or CRT monitors is they don’t even come close to producing accurate color.

This little machine actually looks at your screen and while the software runs it reads what color it’s seeing based on what color the software is actually producing and makes the appropriate adjustments.

No monitor you buy at any price is even close to color correct. You don’t need the big one unless you are doing photo work and want to calibrate your printer as well.

As a side benefit properly set up colors smear less in games as well, not to mention your eyes will love you for the sudden burst of reality you will suddenly see.

If your going to spend a grand for a monitor $200 to make it right doesn’t seem out of line to me.
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absolutly correct

when you greys are more blueish than total greys. then ALL the colors are messed up.

This is just another colorimeter. There are other tools like spectrometer that adjust the monitor to a certain degree (5400k, 6500k or 9600k) Those quickly jump up to $1000 though but i will tell you what. It makes your tv like new again ;)
 
Clank said:
How does that work with dual monitors? I've got 2 monitors running off the same video card, how does the ICC profile differentiate between the 2?
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Unless you have a really high-end video card that could handle two profiles it’s a matter of a balancing act between the two monitors.

If you do serious Photo work etc then I’d just do one monitor a perfect as possible and live with monitor two.

The other answer is run two video cards, which in this age of SLI is becoming more and more common.

You didn’t mention if your one or both of your monitors were DVI, but if only one is then you can calibrate the VGA unit with it’s own controls.
 
http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00C542

Matthew Chilton , may 05, 2005; 10:36 a.m.
There are two levels to this issue, the calibration and the profile:

1. Calibration - Which entails Gamma (the representation of contrast and saturation on-screen) and Whitepoint (temperature of monitor) adjustments of the hardware. Most modern, dual-head video cards include a separate LUT(Look-Up-Table) for each monitor and allow independent calibration of each monitor. Therefore it is possible to maintian 2 calibrations in a dual-monitor setting on Windows.

2. Profiling - This is the tricky part. Typically, after calibration/profiling of your monitor the "custom monitor profile" is assigned to the system's primary monitor. On a dual-monitor system Windows assigns the same monitor profile for both monitors regardless of the configuration. Therefore only one profile can be used at a time in a dual-monitor setting on Windows. This causes you to view images, within programs like Photoshop, through the eyes of one profile for both monitors instead of two profiles, one for each monitor.

However, initial testing with a new Radeon X600 PCI-Express video card has yeilded new results. We (ColorVision) were able to assign independant profiles to each monitor in a Windows XP environment. If you are interested i'll post follow-up test results run within a true "digital-darkroom" setting.

Hope this helps, Matthew
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Matthew Chilton , may 19, 2005; 02:11 p.m.
Just an update - We have tested on several other nVidia cards since my last post and have not been able to maintain a separate profile per monitor. However we are in contact with nVidia at this time and comparing notes. Once I have an answer to this question I will let you know.
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Those quotes are a few months old, but hopefully Colorvision will make some progress with dual head cards.
 
I have the Gretag Mcbeth spyder and find it to be very accurate and easy to use, I am a photographer and calibrate my monitor monthly. The Colorvision is also supposed to be good.
 
Does the printer calibration really work good? Because i know that you have to scan in a print and some scanners will scan different and pick up different colors.

I know that my epson scanner has a light purplish scan color to it when scanned.
 
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