[silkstone]

Has anyone in the US or elsewhere tried the Spyder3Pro? It's available in the UK later this month, but reviews on Amazon.com are mostly poor.

I'm toying with the idea of getting a colorimeter-based monitor profiler after spending years being highly sceptical, but unfortunately the Amazon reviews of this one don't help to change my views.

[Markulous]

I went to all the hassle and not to say extreme expense of borrowing a Spyder and guess what? My monitor was calibrated fine already! 'Nuff said! Over-rated and coming over here - or am I being unfair?

[JMitchell]

I've never had calibration issues and I'm on a cheap Dell freebie thing.

[silkstone]

This new monitor was fine for tonal balance (black and white points) but not for colour - there was a slight blue cast. I've got rid of it by tweaking the monitor colour settings and the Nvidia driver, but it got me thinking about doing it the 'proper' way.

[Markulous]

That was the slippery slope down which I went! Convinced myself that I can't have got it right (and yes, I did balance the colour but used a simple screen display prog)

[silkstone]

Yes I understand exactly what you are saying.

Controversy time!

These colorimeter-based profilers are supposed to be absolute - they're meant to remove subjective judgment altogether. So if you profile two (decent) monitors, the results should be identical and absolutely correct. If you try to profile a rubbish monitor, the software should tell you that it can't do it because the range of adjustment is not available.

But all the reviews I've read say something like.... "It gave pleasing results on monitor XYZ but didn't work as well on ABC." Or something like that. So firstly the results are not consistent, and secondly the reviewers are making a subjective judgment about what does and does not look right. That negates the whole point of profiling.

A few years ago I bought a Spyder2 Express and tried it on an LCD monitor that was, admittedly, a little old. It produced an obvious magenta cast and also a very washed-out tonal balance. The colours were definitely not right - yes, that's subjective but my eyes aren't all that bad. So I sent it back and reverted to manual calibration.

I wondered if things had improved, but I'm not hearing anything to persuade me that they have.

[Steve]

Dave recently went through all this and ended up giving up on colour calibration as well. P-E uses colour calibration and as far as I am aware, is totally happy. I manually adjust my monitor to match the print output from the professional printing company that I use so that what I see on the screen matches my print results.

Since Dave and I use the same brand and model of monitor, I also tried his 'profile' and found it almost matched my settings. The big difference is that I got no colour shifts/brightness or contrast changes in between different applications or when viewing through internet browsers with my settings, but with his profile I did.

I guess its horses for courses, I have now gone back to my known and working manual settings

[silkstone]

Yep, thanks Steve. I've now set up this monitor so it *appears* to give fairly neutral colours throughout the greyscale range, and the black and white points are OK according to the test charts. There's noticeable backlight bleed at the bottom, but that's covered by the taskbar so doesn't really matter.

I'm sold on the idea of widescreen after using standard format 19" for a few years. This 22" Samsung monitor will be alright for now if I can just stop myself from fiddling (the perils of being a perfectionist ), and I'm going to watch the prices of 24" NEC, Eizo, etc with the latest H-IPS panels which are supposed to be the best now. Just about all the cheaper ones use TN which isn't ideal. I also haven't forgotten the budget 24" with the VA panel you told me about.

[silkstone]

Despite internal alarm bells and the caveats in this thread, I've decided to risk £100 on a Spyder3 Pro from Warehouse.

Watch this space for a rant about it on Tuesday.

[silkstone]

Here's the promised rant...

Well actually it's not too bad. The Spyder3 is easy to use and the results are acceptable to my eyes, although really it shouldn't be a subjective thing at all.

If anything, the calibration has replaced a very cool colour balance (with all monitor and graphics card controls at their default values) with a slightly warm balance. It's rather like going from Ektachrome to Fuji Velvia.

My manual calibration was OK but it was difficult to get a uniform balance throughout the whole tonal range. I'm not 100% convinced that the Spyder3 has actually done much better - it's just a little different - but I'll live with it for now.

At least it's not obviously wrong.

[silkstone]

I'm talking to myself again here, but that's never stopped me yet....

As reported above, the first results from the Spyder3 Pro (which, by the way, is now branded 'datacolor' rather than 'Colorvision') were OK but not over-inspiring.

The Spyder3 software lets you either check the current calibration or recalibrate. I did a few checks and it told me all was well, but there was still (to my eyes) an issue with a slightly uneven colour balance over the tonal range. Mid-tones were, if anything, slightly warm (yellow/red) whilst extreme highlights went the other way (towards blue/magenta). I should say that these colour casts were *very* slight, but I'm something of a perfectionist (otherwise known as a fussy bu99er).

So I did a complete recalibration and, lo and behold, the results were distinctly better. This suggests that...

(a) These things can work.

(b) But not every time.

(c) They are not absolute. You can't rely on them to get it right, and they don't necessarily give the same results every time.

Overall I'm fairly pleased with the Spyder3. It has (at the second attempt) produced a result I'm 90% happy with, and short of paying at least twice as much for a monitor and calibration hardware/software I don't think I'm going to improve much on that.

So a qualified 'Recommended' from this reviewer.

[P-E]

Good to hear you are getting there Silky

[Steve]

Interesting...so the first time it reported all was well and yet you thought there was something a miss. You recalibrated and despite it reporting all was well the second profile was different (and more to your liking) than the first. It seems a bit hit and miss to me and still somewhat subjective.

Maybe best out of 3 or 5 would be the way to go

[Larne]

I run two PCs, one I use as my primary image manipulation machine and the other which I use as for more general purposes (and it holds my 'family snaps' catalogue). Biggest problem I have had was trying to get the image on both screens to look the same and worrying that even when they were close were they right?

The latest set of prints I got had a noticeable 'warm' feeling to the fleshtones but looked fine on the screen so I decided to take the risk and invest in the entry level Spyder (£60 including shipping).

So far I am impressed with the results. The colours on both screens are now the same, the only problem I have is that one of them is not bright enough but that seems to be down to the LCD monitor - even at maximum brightness it seems very dull so maybe a new screen will be required at some point.

So I guess that puts me in the 'works for me' camp. So far at least.

[olaxip]

"I manually adjust my monitor to match the print output from the professional printing company that I use so that what I see on the screen matches my print results"


Steve can you advise me on how to do the above or what a print output is, i am thinking of using a service like ProAm Imaging as my prints never look the same as wh