matthewbmedia wrote:
Surprisingly, I had really good results On the cheap with a $50 Huey Pro. I did have to throw a blanket over the monitor during calibration though.
The huey pro doesn't "officially support" wide gamut monitors though, so I would lean towards Colin's recommendation.
I didn't think the iMac was wide gamut. Is it? Mine doesn't look wide gamut. It's certainly not on the Apple page that I can see.
No, I don't think it is either. It's the same panel as the Dell u2711 which is wide gamut, but I believe that is because of the CCFL backlight - I was making a point for "future proofing" a calibrator purchase, you'd probably want to buy one that supported wide gamut calibration. That being said, many claim that it is "unofficially comparable" to a wide gamut display:
its quite easy to see the gamut of any Mac monitor in 3D vs editing and printer color spaces using the Colorsync utility. Here are plots from my 24" DuoCore iMac:
Select the profile you want in gray first. Then using the drop down menu under the triangle in the upper left corner select "hold for comparison" and then pick a second one. The images above are screen shots, but in the utility you can rotate the wireframes.
Seeing color spaces in 3D really makes it easy to understand how they relate to each other. The monitor is roughly the size of sRGB and much smaller than AdobeRGB. The gamut of my HP 8/C printer is much more saturated in some colors and much less saturated in others. Here's how the printer gamut fits into the AdobeRGB editing space...
The fact 8/C inkjets, even cheap $120 ones, are larger than AdobeRGB is why the larger ProPhotoRGB space is better for editing files for ink jet printing, but only if editing in 16 bit mode.
I just used ColorThink 2.2 to inspect the ColorMunki built profile for my 27" iMac ( early 2010). Modeling using LAB, it is slightly larger than sRGB in all of the lighter and most of the midtone colros colors, and over all has a much larger gamut from Cyan over to red , particularly i the mid tone blues and magentas , and is also larger from cyan over to Green. it has a significantly larger saturated light green range as well. I calibrated for 6500K and a luminance level of 80.
My Spyder3 greeted profile has an even larger blue and magenta gamut but it is not as large in the opposite direction (yellow). the extreme of the green gamut were oriented slightly differently than the CM profile but are roughly the same distance from the L axis . It also produced a deeper black.
