Manipulators
A while ago I bought a Colorvision Spyder2Pro and I even recommended it to several people. It had dual monitor support (finally) and while time consuming seemed to produce consistent results.
The other day I was calibrating a dual monitor setup and one of the two came out distinctly blue. I tried several passes, updating drivers, etc, same thing. Contacted Colorvision and they said ” Windows does not support duel [sic] monitor calibration using duelhead [sic] video cards two separate cards are required.” I pointed out that it worked fine before, that their ‘profile chooser’ software seems made to deal with any Windows problems with that setup, and that in the right mode the nVidia drivers treat the monitors separately, didn’t get a reply. So I tried single monitor mode as well…
And I noticed something interesting… of three NEC FE991SB monitors (the most expensive 19″ one could buy at Fry’s for a while) two came out obviously blue, one comes out normal. Far more interesting though is that the Spyder2Pro gives no indication that anything is wrong with the calibration of the blue ones.
Contacting Colorvision again, their wonder “support” tells me to try the latest driver (I’d of course included in my initial email that I’d already upgraded to the latest drivers) and that “Should this not work the product can be returned to place of purchase for a refund.”. Keeping in mind I bought it maybe six months ago that seems rather incorrect, but more importantly, does any part of this exchange sound correct for a product that has “Pro” in the name?
Further, almost all modern multi-monitor pro workstation setups are driving both monitors off the same card, even in SLI… so not only is calling it Pro a red herring, so are the pictures of it being used with dual monitors in any modern setup.
Assuming I’m not getting any better support from Colorvision, what’s a good resource to find out more about color calibration and what are my options?
I know many places still use Minolta color meters, but my concern there is that you connect the monitor to the color meter, so there’s no way to check that nothing is being overlaid on the output (or that the output is right in the first place) and that it doesn’t really make dual monitors ‘match’ (which the Colorvision *used* to) and that never inspires confidence that things are right, plus they don’t provide any useful way to set brightness/contrast to a standard.
GretagMacbeth!
I’ve purchased the i1color “Display” for personal use, and they have correctly adjusted to the dual-monitor world. I think the software is still far from perfect, but it is much better than nothing.
As far as good resources for color management, I’m not really sure. Adobe has a lot of info, but it’s more print-oriented. I also can’t find any definitive answer on how I should calibrate my workstation monitors for a CG workflow, but I’m intelligently guesstimating that I should do it for 6500k, 2.2 Gamma–HDTV standards.
Oh…and it also lets you match a target for brightness and contrast–ESSENTIAL for making 2 monitors match as closely as possible.