Ok so bit of a big update. Some will recall I've had the i1 Display Pro for years now and calibrated all my screens with it, namely the old LG 34UM95-P which worked amazingly thanks to having a built in LUT that LG's software used the i1 for and profiled directly to the monitor. No faffing with icc profiles.
I've personally never liked calibrating via icc profiles as even a GFX driver update can mean the need to recalibrate if the new driver changes anything to do with the display output colours etc, whereas hardware LUT profiling is fixed to the monitor, and all input sources gain the same calibrated output.
I tried calibrating when the DW first came out but no software supported QD-OLED, and you need a spectral profile for the calibration software to tell the software how to read the panel type basically, at that time only like 1 or 2 spectral profiles existed on the DisplayCAL global database, and it was unclear how accurate these were but I tried them anyway and didn't like the results I was getting as they didn't seem "right" to my eyes.
I figured today I'd give it another shot and saw that recent spectral profiles have been uploaded to the database and they are labelled correctly too, as I work in sRGB for everything, I picked the sRGB one.
First I ran a calibration whilst in Creator mode on the OSD, the results were good but showed the sRGB colour range at 96% coverage, and when in HDR mode in Windows, using the HDR calibrated profile with the MS tool, the colours looked out of whack.
I then reran calibration but this time with the OSD in custom colour mode and used the DisplayCAL measurement window to adjust OSD RGB values to meet in the middle, also adjusted brightness and contrast to meet my new desired target brightness of 120cd/m2 which is the recommended brightness for office use displays in normal lighting conditions. Before this I was using anywhere from 90 to 120 depending on how I felt.
The before reading of just doing the reading when in Creator mode for sRGB was this:
Clearly there is too much green which without a back and forth comparison wasn't obvious, and a dE of 6.6 seemed odd too.
But setting the OSD to custom colour and adjusting the RGB and brightness/contrast to get everything in the middle resulted in these new readings:
The calibration took about 18 minutes, which is also much longer than what I recall way back when I first tried it using the early spectral profiles, so clearly the latest ones are what they should be now for QD-OLED.
Result:
A dE of 0.63, that's a bit better than my LG34UM95-P which was about 0.78 at its best.
What I'm now seeing are more punchy colours vs Creator Mode, but all calibrated to 6500K, and my new luminance of 120cd/m2 (ignore the screen above showing 100, that was before other adjustments were made). I am really pleased with this, and will keep an eye on GFX driver change notes for if they change anything to do with colour, I'll have to recalibrate.
HDR also has the correct colours now too, so switching to custom colour sorted that out it seems.
So as it stands, Windows is now using two icc profiles, one exclusively for HDR, created with the Microsoft HDR Calibration Tool, and one created using DisplayCAL with the spectral profile chosen for sRGB.
For reference my RGB values in Custom Colour are: R 100 G 92 B 94. Brightness is now 56, and contrast is now 70. This results in the 120cd/m2 luminance measured.
Happy days!
The folding cover thing on it is covered in that soft rubbery plastic film that over the years becomes sticky so I need to wipe that away using rubbing alcohol at some point, that's my only gripe lol.