FYI, Spectraview II does not work with my new laptop, which to my chagrin is the machine I planned to use for photo processing. I don't know if the incompatibility is with the OS or the graphics card or the graphics driver (I do have all updated drivers). The machine is an HP Pavillion TX2500x (dual-core AMD 64-bit processor, 4GB memory) running Windows Vista 64 Ultimate. The PC uses an ATI Radeon 3200 HD graphics card. This is not a retail card, but presumably one that ATI available to PC makers, such as HP. NEC advertises Spectraview II to be compatible with ATI Radeon cards and drivers, so there's pretty clearly a bug here. The problem is in the calibration process. The software runs okay for 40% of the calibration processes, but then computes bizarre, random table settings, resulting not in a black background, but in one that somewhere between brick red and chocolate brown, i.e., completely unusable. Each time the process runs a different color results. I spent a lot of time with the NEC support folks (who are some of the most technically reasonable people I've worked with on a support line). They concluded that there was probably some kind of bug that the engineers would have to resolve. Be forewarned if you happen to be contemplating a combo like mine. It's kinda sad to spend nearly $3K on a monitor and PC, having checked out the compatibility specs beforehand, only to find out that they are not correct.
Here are things that I would check, don't know if they will make any difference:
1. Get the latest video drivers from ATI.
2. Attempt the calibration with the notebook display turned off.
3. Check with HP to confirm that your video setup actually supports dual monitor calibration and can maintain dual profiles. My expectation would be that most notebooks wouldn't. But, this may be a standard feature in Vista now (I wouldn't know because I have continued to use XP). If you have the 3090, it requires dual link DVI. This is a pretty rare feature on notebook computers and I wouldn't expect it on an HP notebook. So it would not be able to drive the monitor at full resolution.
4. Microsoft has a free color management powertoy or utility that you can use to load and manage profiles ... I might pick this up and see if it has any impact on your situation. I'm not sure how this utility fits into the Vista environment because I use it under XP ... may not be required.
> the TX is a tablet PC and it won't have the dual link video for output.
My laptop has a VGA (secondary) output. NEC indicates that DVI is "recommended." Maybe I missed the part in the manual that said a DVI output is "required?"
> 1. Get the latest video drivers from ATI.
Yes, already did that (from HP; ATI does not supply drivers for this card)
> 2. Attempt the calibration with the notebook display turned off.
Interesting idea. Not sure how to do it but I'll try when back in the office tomorrow.
> 3. Check with HP to confirm that your video setup actually supports dual monitor
> calibration and can maintain dual profiles.
I had previously tested out dual calibration using Spyder2Pro and two monitors (the native notebook monitor and a separate 1280x1024 normal old LCD). That worked fine, with separate profiles for each display. (I just had to run ProfileChooser to get the two profiles loaded.)
> My expectation would be that most notebooks wouldn't. But, this may be a standard
> feature in Vista now (I wouldn't know because I have continued to use XP). If you have
> the 3090, it requires dual link DVI.
I have the NEC 2690WUXi. It's 1200x1920, for which single link is enough. I guess the next question I should ask NEC is whether calibration can be run when connected by a VGA cable. They don't seem to rule it out, at least in the literature I've read. Is it buried in the user manual somewhere that DVI is actually *required* to calibrate this monitor?
> 4. Microsoft has a free color management powertoy or utility that you can use to load
> and manage profiles ... I might pick this up and see if it has any impact on your
> situation. I'm not sure how this utility fits into the Vista environment because I use it
> under XP ... may not be required.
Thanks. I've mostly tried to remove all non-NEC color software from the system, to be sure I'm isolating the problem.
I appreciate the feedback and suggestions. If anyone sees immediately what's wrong do please let me know. Thanks!
OK ... that clarifies much. I would not expect Spectraview II to be able to perform a calibration over a VGA connection. I'm pretty surprised that it even started the calibration. There is extensive communications between the monitor and computer ... but, I don't know for a fact that it won't work over VGA. The ability to automatically update the hardware LUT's in the monitor is a very highend feature only offered on a small percentage of monitors and I would expect a requirement to have a DVI connection. In addition, working from memory ... but, I think the DVI connection even has to support a two way communications protocol (that I can not remember off the top of my head, but you should be able to find quickly on the internet).
But, from what you say it should be possible to perform an EXTERNAL calibration on the 2690 and get it working ... I would just use the software supplied with your sensor. As far as I know you will lose the benefits of Spectraview II (internal LUTs updates, fully automated calibration) if you are just doing an EXTERNAL calibration of the monitor and creating a profile for your video card.
You might call NEC back, I don't use VGA connections on any of my workstations.
OK ... that clarifies much. I would not expect Spectraview II to be able to perform a calibration over a VGA connection.
I looked into this some more. The communication protocol that is presumably used is in fact supported over VGA. I really think there is simply a bug in the NEC software (or in the ATI driver or in Windows Vista 64 or in the combination of all of these things). The NEC customer support guys seem to agree. Yes, I could drop back to using Spyder2Pro, but that sensor is known to have problems with the large gamut of the 2690. Alas, if it's not one thing it's another with all these technologies. So nice when they just work!
