I'm moving to wide-gamut monitors (24" Asus PA246Q, P-IPS, 1920x1200) and I'm obviously going to need to replace my old Spyder 2 calibration hardware. I've been out of touch in this area for a while... can someone kindly enlighten me as to the best hardware calibration solution for this kind of a monitor?
I'm initially looking at the Spyder 3 Elite and the i1 Display Pro. Any preference? Any others you'd recommend? Anything (including the obvious) that I've missed or should learn about?
It's been recently updated, and seems to favor the i1 Display Pro very strongly. Only the $1300 Discus comes out ahead of it... but then at five times the price, it should!
Thanks for that link, Rodolfo. If I was you I'd be buying an X-Rite i1 Display Pro (not to be confused with the older X-Rite Eye-One Pro). In fact I'll probably get one too even though it may only be useful for my laptop screen.
I have an Eizo ColorEdge and an NEC Spectraview that each have their own dedicated software designed to work with a "standard" Eye-One Display 2. The article you linked to suggests that the quality of those Eye-One units is rather unpredictable at best but on the plus side the software allows the use of the 10-bit (or more) internal look-up tables in the monitors instead of playing with the 8-bit look-up table in the graphics card. If I had to use the graphics card then I'd definitely want the more consistent and more accurate i1 Display Pro.
In your case I think you are relying on the graphics card LUT and so there is no need to stick with the older technology such as the Eye-One Display 2, especially with a wide gamut screen.
Don't worry too much about the price of these things (except perhaps for the $1300 unit) - it is relatively small compared with what we spend on photographic and computer equipment. And now that they've reached a decent quality and consistency level it would be even more worthwhile.
So, based on that article it's really a no-brainer
On the plus side, Alan, the article also says that the colorimeters' biggest weakness is the variability introduced by multiple backlighting systems which the units are not tuned to handle, but that the units customized specifically to a single manufacturer's display technology tend to be very accurate. So it would seem to me that both your Eizo and NEC are very well covered.
I have not found a lot of stuff to read on this issue (reviews and such), so I'm going to take a small leap of faith and assume that the Dry Creek Photo people know exactly what they're talking about. The i1 Display Pro it is, then.
Very interested in this. I have a HP wide gamut monitor that i'am having a hard time calibrating with my old Monoco optix hardware. Can't seem to find any decent info other than a the buy NEC+spectra suggestion
Rodolfo Paiz wrote:
On the plus side, Alan, the article also says that the colorimeters' biggest weakness is the variability introduced by multiple backlighting systems which the units are not tuned to handle, but that the units customized specifically to a single manufacturer's display technology tend to be very accurate. So it would seem to me that both your Eizo and NEC are very well covered.
I have not found a lot of stuff to read on this issue (reviews and such), so I'm going to take a small leap of faith and assume that the Dry Creek Photo people know exactly what they're talking about. The i1 Display Pro it is, then....Show more →
That seems like a good "middle of the road" decision.
The problem with varying backlights is often flicker, when the instrument checks the brightest levels the integration time ("shutter speed") might get shorter than the backlight flicker cycle. You then get the same effect as you get when shooting at 1/200s in bad fluorescent lighting, WB varies as the wavelength composition cycles between the pulses driving the light.
This is a compromise between dark read noise and bright overload capacity - a DR problem, just like in a camera. Some softwares can now average several measurements tot get a better estimate, this often gives a lot better measurement precision.
We use the i1 pro (old one) spectrophotometer among several other solutions, but since we have the facility to make reference measurements variability is a lot smaller problem. You do have to be careful to not bang the instruments around though, then they tend to get misalignment issues.
Do not underestimate the value of user competence. Do it right, be thorough and methodical, and do several sanity-checks after calibration. You can very often get the very best results with some manual labor - checking the primaries exact location, setting in-monitor gamma/brightness up as close as possible to target and then just making the calibration soft adjust for the last few steps of linearity (this assuming your monitor doesn't have programmable LUTs, i.e hardware calibration). This gives the best profile you can get (less data-loss due to banding, less noise-induced problems, less local variation in colors).
Alan321 wrote:
Thanks for that link, Rodolfo. If I was you I'd be buying an X-Rite i1 Display Pro (not to be confused with the older X-Rite Eye-One Pro). In fact I'll probably get one too even though it may only be useful for my laptop screen.
I have an Eizo ColorEdge and an NEC Spectraview that each have their own dedicated software designed to work with a "standard" Eye-One Display 2. The article you linked to suggests that the quality of those Eye-One units is rather unpredictable at best but on the plus side the software allows the use of the 10-bit (or more) internal look-up tables in the monitors instead of playing with the 8-bit look-up table in the graphics card. If I had to use the graphics card then I'd definitely want the more consistent and more accurate i1 Display Pro. ...Show more →
just a note the 10-14bit internal LUTs do nothing to make up for instrument variation, if one is out of spec it will be jsut as much so on 14bit internal NEC as on 8bit graphics card to U2410 Dell
skibum5 wrote:
just a note the 10-14bit internal LUTs do nothing to make up for instrument variation, if one is out of spec it will be jsut as much so on 14bit internal NEC as on 8bit graphics card to U2410 Dell
Yep. Hence the dilemma: The possibility of getting better performance with the internal LUT vs the possibility of a crappy device getting it all wrong. Chances are that next time I order something from the US I'll add a new i1 and see whether or not it works better than my existing device on the big monitors. It's sure to do better on the laptop, so it won't be wasted either way.
Ideally, the monitor profiling software will be upgraded to work with the new device.
For now it's academic because most of the time I'm not where my monitors are
theSuede wrote:
Do not underestimate the value of user competence. Do it right, be thorough and methodical, and do several sanity-checks after calibration. You can very often get the very best results with some manual labor - checking the primaries exact location, setting in-monitor gamma/brightness up as close as possible to target and then just making the calibration soft adjust for the last few steps of linearity (this assuming your monitor doesn't have programmable LUTs, i.e hardware calibration). This gives the best profile you can get (less data-loss due to banding, less noise-induced problems, less local variation in colors).
I don't underestimate the value of user competence... that's why I'm trying to acquire some.
Could you go into a little more detail on this paragraph I've quoted? I'm not sure what you mean by "checking the primaries' exact location" and so on, but I'd like to learn.
I would like to learn as well. I have the same monitor, and am starting to feel entirely out of my league on this monitor calibration stuff. The ASUS website is useless.
