Now, the first has two advantages, first that it is $100 which is awesome, and it can also profile my printer. How important is this if I am using Ilford paper on a Pro9000 with the profiles provided by Ilford?
And obviously the second one is a little pricier, but is newer technology.
If it matters, I am profiling the MacBook Pro's 15.4" LED LCD screen and my Samsung 245T 24" screen.
Thanks for the input, and G.W. Bush for the "stimulus" check that I am going to use to pick either of these puppies up with.
Kevin, I'm fairly sure that you cannot accurately profile a printer unless you have a standard to measure it against. I mean you must have a 'target' with known values to compare to a similar image from your printer. I don't think the Spyder2 Suite has that.
But I've not used it, and maybe someone else will have some experience with it.
First most laptop LCD do not calibrate well for they have 6 bit TN LCD. I know your Mac book uses LED for the LCD back-light. All that means to me is that it has a newer LED back-light instead of the normal fluorescent back-light. I can not find out what kind of LCD panel is used in the Mac books. The Samsung 244T (widescreen) has a 24 inch 6 ms (g2g) S-PVA (Samsung LTM240M2) panel and should calibrate well. I don't know much about Canon Professional printers like the Pro9000. I have the Epson 4800 professional printer. In its manual it states that every Epson professional printer is collaborated during manufacturing and it is burnt into the printers memory. I just use the ICC profile provided by the paper manufactures for the Epson 4800. I don't know how well a $100 device can calibrate your printer. You may want to read some reviews to see if any of the reviewers tried using in on a Pro9000. You can also buy custom ICC profiloes created for your printer. http://www.drycreekphoto.com/custom/customprofiles.htm
Note: Due to a backlog of profiling orders, drycreekphoto.com custom profiling serivce is suspended for the time being.
The spyder2 suite has software only printer profiling which is next to nothing. You would be better off with the Spyder3Print or PrintFix Pro if you can still find it in stores. PrintFix Pro has the same spectrocolorimeter (Datacolor 1005) that the newer Spyder3Print uses. You can upgrade the software for free.
I have been using Spyder products for about 6 years now and currently use the Spyder3 Elite monitor calibrator and PrintFixPro to calibrate papers for my Canon iPF5000. The newer monitor calibrator (Spyder3)is totally redesigned with a larger sensor, ambient light detector and seven color detection engine that is optimized for wide gamut monitors.
