I've owned this screen for just under a week now and must say I like it. I've been reading up on the colour profiles etc (never looked into this before) and would like to know if the colour profiles will effect gaming in any way? i.e. if I use the latest Beta profile, run the screen in Game Mode and then boot up, say, Mass Effect 2 will the profile still be controlling the colours or will the game take over a render the profile inactive?
Thanks!
The game will take over and render the profile inactive. Although Microsoft included colour management support in Windows, the only thing included with Windows, which uses it by default, is Windows Photo Viewer. The desktop and any ordinary desktop apps cannot use it (even though it looked like they were promising support for this in Windows 7), and nor will Direct X.. IE Games.
To support the profile an app must specifically include support for colour management. Although there's not too many that do (other than the obvious pro graphics apps like Photoshop), some important apps like Firefox also include support. If you go to about:config in Firefox, change gfx.color_management.mode to 1, and point gfx.color_management.display_profile to the place where your ICM file is, when you restart Firefox will render everything like you were in sRGB mode, even though you're actually in Game Mode.
So if all someone did is mainly browse the web and game it could make it more viable for them to leave the U2410 in Game Mode all the time. The caveat, which I tried to explain at length in a post on the previous page, is that it's throwing away several million colours to achieve this look on a wide gamut 8 bit panel like the U2410. The only way to avoid it is either not to use an ICM and live with the wide gamut, buy an ordinary sRGB screen instead (which doesn't need an ICM file to limit its gamut), or get a graphics card and screen which supports 10 bit colour, then hope the app you're using supports 10 bit colour. You'll probably be waiting a while (as in years probably, or at least until the next version of Windows) to see games using this stuff..