colour calibration confusion

andy91

andy91

andy91

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8 Sep 2008
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Whats the cheapest colour calibration device that's worth buying? I'm planning on buying a new monitor most likely an IPS so want to get the most out of it but spending a lot of money on a calibration device is not really an option.

Also when the monitor has been calibrated will the calibrated profile be used with every bit of software thats run on the pc including games running at different resolutions and so on? I'm sure I read somewhere that windows 7 UI is not colour managed so it wont make any difference to that which in my case would then make calibration pointless.
 
Unless your monitor has a hardware LUT (generally £800+ models), as native support stands there really isn't any point in calibration if you're a gamer. The titles that are colour managed (i.e. read and understand the ICC profiles you create) are few and far between. What some colorimeters can assist you with, however, is to give you a general idea of any severe colour balance issues. This would allow you to adjust the colour balance via the monitor's OSD and such settings would apply to every application including games. The problem here is that the cheaper colorimeters generally don't provide such a useful level of reporting - I'm not all that well versed in the current colorimeter market so I'm sure some lovely people here could give more specific recommendations.
 
So ICC profiles only work with colour managed applications?

My original understanding of colour calibration was based around using the monitor's OSD and therefore calibrating for everything. Does the spyder3 pro allow this?

The screen Im looking at getting is the HP ZR24w

Also I'm not just a gamer but a web developer so would prefer a calibrated screen.
 
The Spyder 3 Pro does indeed allow you to base part of the calibration on the RGB sliders on the OSD. Obviously for the kind of accuracy you'd want for your web development work the full ICC profile (which adjusts for the GPU output, gamma etc.) will be welcome but for gaming even improving the overall colour balance via the OSD (which the Spyder 3P assists with) should yield nice results. This is based on a Spyder 3 Elite which I use frequently on my reference screens I am fairly confident the the Pro edition includes the same kind of process. Although it is a review of the S3E the TFT Central review covers the overall process quite nicely.
 
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Iv been doing a bit of reading around and it seems that on wide gamut monitors only colour aware programs such as photoshop will use the properly calibrated profile but since the HP ZR24w is not a wide gamut monitor then surly it should work in and out of colour aware programs.
 
ICC profiles which are produced during calibration are generally discarded for games and movies unless you have an application which can make use of them. the calibration process would normally guide you through getting the screen to the optimum hardware settings, but that only really adjusts your brightness, contrast and RGB levels. After that the adjustments would be made at a software level to the graphics card LUT which would then return you the better colour accuracy, gamma, white point. this would be active during most applications, but not games normally

on a wide gamut display, the ICC profile would also be responsible for telling sRGB content how to display properly on a wide gamut monitor. on a standard gamut monitor, this element is not important, but the fine adjustments which correct colour accuracy etc are still there
 
That seems to make sense, I guess what Im getting at is would it be worth it for me to get a Spyder 3 Pro and calibrate a HP ZR24w?

The reason for my confusion is I had somebody calibrate my high end CRT monitor a few years back and it was all basically done with the monitors built in hardware controls controls. There was no mention of ICC profiles....It made a big difference.

So the Spyder 3 Pro will allow me to calibrate the monitors hardware settings?
 
andy91 said:
That seems to make sense, I guess what Im getting at is would it be worth it for me to get a Spyder 3 Pro and calibrate a HP ZR24w?

The reason for my confusion is I had somebody calibrate my high end CRT monitor a few years back and it was all basically done with the monitors built in hardware controls controls. There was no mention of ICC profiles....It made a big difference.

So the Spyder 3 Pro will allow me to calibrate the monitors hardware settings?
Click to expand...



well you could use one of the many free software utilities to help you get the optimum OSD settings as they are reasonably basic adjustments which can be made. you should be easily able to get the screen "feeling" nice and looking good if that is your main preference. if you want absolute accuracy of colours, accurate gamma and white point, or profiling for colour space matching or between different devices, you'd need a colorimeter to achieve that
 
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