Spider 4 pro. Can I trust it?

[eyetrip]

Bought a spider 4 pro, to take the guess work out of colour settings, but not entirely convinced...

It's mainly the black levels and gamma that are making me question it.

Being a bit colour blind, I figured it was better than the guessing I have been doing for some time using the Lagom.nl tests by eye.

But after calibration, I decided to check the Lagos tests anyway. Sure, the image looked nicer than the default, well I just don't know if it's 'right'.

What I noticed was the lower couple of blacks on the black test were not distinguishable.

The gamma test didn't line up with their 'ideal', and the sharpness and viewing angle tests showed the gamma being a bit off too.

So, how accurate should I expect the Lagom tests to be after running the spider calibration?

Edit

Also, what's the point of the ambient light sensor running? After calibration have changed ambient light levels, but it doesn't seem to do anything, whereas reading around suggests it should be making adjustments to levels in some way...

 

[eyetrip]

Nobody got any input on this thing?

Got it to prevent myself from fiddling, and am fiddling more now than ever.

I'm just not sure I trust it on the gamma/black level front.

Just looks to me like it's killing black levels lower down.

 

[Adrianr]

The only way you can be sure is validating the calibration created by your Spyder with a better more accurate (more expensive) device. If you don't have one of those to hand you may as well just go by what looks best to your eyes. If you don't do any work requiring colour accuracy I've never understood why so many people want to calibrate anyway - If it looks good it looks good, just don't worry about it and enjoy the monitor.

The point of an ambient light sensor is to adjust the monitor luminance based on the level of ambient light. If you work in a really bright room you will want to calibrate your monitor to a higher luminance value, and vice versa for a darker room. If you work in an environment with dynamic lighting this feature should save you from having to recalibrate every time the sun comes out but again, if you need that sort of accuracy you shouldn't be working in that sort of set up.

 

[eyetrip]

Apart from photo editing, I do get involved in a lot of web work (and despite being a developer rather than designer, end up having to do a fair bit more design related stuff than would like).

I want my Mac and desktop PC displays looking as much alike as possible, and at least fairly accurate in general.

Have had it happen couple times where working on something and think it looks ok, only to go to another screen and it looks wrong.

Now, if I were a designer or pro tog, I would spend more money on these things, but figured this would be enough for what I need.

Plus, as I mentioned, am a bit colour blind so don't entirely trust what I am setting by eye at times, and end up in that fiddle cycle.

In the end, I tried dispcalc and argyll, and that seemed to at least calibrate with black levels looking alright.

At least the two programs agreed 100% on colour settings, which is what mostly wanted out of it.

 

[JBuk]

Lots of people calibrate using a spider pro and have no issues, you will have to trust it rather than get paranoid as your eyes won't calibrate as accurate, would being colourblind affect anything?

 

[eyetrip]

Lots of people calibrate using a spider pro and have no issues, you will have to trust it rather than get paranoid as your eyes won't calibrate as accurate, would being colourblind affect anything?

My colour blindness not affect my ability to ditinguish blacks and whites. For the most part I can see colours for what they are, but am definitely rd/green colour blind.

I find it off that the spider results end up crushing blacks where the dispcalgui and argyll do not.

Though with argyll, the whites are ever so slightly blown.

Will be setting it up on my MacBook, and once done that will find some way to compare it to one of the designers screens at work for comparison. Being designers I am hoping their screens are calibrated properly.

Not fiddling any more with it this week though. Want to try relaxing my last few days of holiday

 

[old gamer]

reminds me of a time i had a samsung plasma tv i could not get right, i must have fiddled with it every day for about a year, i was glad when i bought another tv as i was doing my head in

 

[Aurhinius]

My advice to you is trust the device unless something looks distinctly wrong and I doubt it does.

Having gone through your experience when I first bought my eye display 2.

You look at the image and suddenly feel that everything is washed out and doesn't look vibrant any more!

Here's the thing. Vibrant in your face saturated colours are fake. Images don't look like that and aren't meant to look like that but most display manufacturers especially TV ones over saturate colours using a factory demo mode to make them look "great".

Your eyes have been trained over many years to think saturated colours are the norm and look good.

You now need to retrain your eyes and your brain to what "normal" colours should look like. Then after a little while you'll be used them and can spot an over saturated display a mile away.

Remember for best calibration it is important to take an ambient light measurement using your normal lighting conditions.

Generally you should be calibrating with the following - colour temperature of 6500K, Gamma of 2.2, white level of 120cd you can use RGB or D6500 colour space doesn't matter. Settings depend on what your software allows but I tend to use dispcalGUI (because it's free and support my eye display 2 and many others)

Make sure you import the correction table for your spyder(if it is available) if you are using DispcalGUI.

Remember it also depends on your monitor. Some monitors just aren't that great even after calibration.

I can post my results if you want on my TN panel.