I am looking for a good monitor calibrator to use with my 24" i-Mac and MacBook under $200. The Color Vision Spyder3 Express calibrator seems to get mixed reviews, but is priced very well. I will be purchasing the X-Rite Passport Color Checker to place in a room in order to get more accurate colors and white balance when shooting interiors. I would appreciate comments and suggestions.
I believe I bought my 24" i-mac in 2009. I use Mt. Lion, LR and ACR CS5. Some have said that a good gray card might be just as useful as spending the $ for the Passport.
As I said, you will find it damn near impossible to bring the brightness of that iMac down below something like 140 cd/m2 brightness where you generally want 100-120 (ish)
Like Mr. Joe, I ended up using BasICColor Display (which shares a history w/ the ColorEyes) to achieve the same thing. Then I got an NEC external monitor.
Just as an additional datapoint, the way BasICColor does that is not magic. It just lowers the white point (think PS Curves upper-right corner) downwards. That has the unfortunate side effect of lowering the range between black and white. Taht was one of the reasons I now do my PS work on the NEC and leave the palettes on the iMac screen. They're fairly close (after lots of trial and error in calibration tweaking the XY white points)
I haven't looked in a while but I think that BasICColor's price gives you 1 CPU (as many monitors as you want) (free CPU transfer) whereas ColorEyes (I think/recall) let you put it on 3 CPUs
Or put it towards an external monitor and not worry too much about the iMac calibration (he could use Shades s/w to lower it w/o concern for color calibration)
Peter Urbanski wrote:
I will be purchasing the X-Rite Passport Color Checker to place in a room in order to get more accurate colors and white balance when shooting interiors. I would appreciate comments and suggestions.
I doubt that this will help you much. The color checker is generally used to create a camera profile for certain lighting conditions. It's a great concept and it has its uses but when you are photographing room interiors you will have an awkward mix of man-made and natural lighting, each affected by reflections off coloured walls and furniture. You'll never get it all right at the same time. You would need to have color checkers at different locations to get a feel for what gets affected and how at different locations.
If you're going to get the Color Checker Passport I would definitely consider either the Colormunki Display or better yet X-Rite i1 Display Pro. You can find some nice bundle deals including either calibrator + color checker passport.
I recently saw a nice deal that included the color checker passport + colormunki display for $169 for a short period of time. A few days ago the same combo sold for $189 on ebay.
Of course do your research first, but just a thought since both are highly recommended.