Monitor Calibration Tools and Software

Question

At work, I have two monitors. Both of them are Dell E198WFPs, however, manufactured 8 months apart from one another, so they're not from the same lot. I'm looking to calibrate them. Currently, my secondary monitor (on the left) is the one I use for text reading, because it's easier to read. Can someone suggest either a cheap calibration puck that works well, or a software solution that's relatively easy to work with? I run Windows XP and have full admin access to my machine (I'm the domain administrator)

My graphics card in the machine is an nVidia Quadro NVS 285, if that makes much of a difference.

Answer 1

It really depends what you're doing, and how important the colour-accuracy is.

If it's just "so they look the same", you can probably do it by eye. Bring up a photo on both montiors (Macie the KODAK Digital LAD Test Image is good for this), then fiddle with the settings until they look the same. Typically you reset everything on both monitors (which can often get you most of the way there), then adjust the contrast, then brightness then colour-balance till the two match.

I also found "Monitor Color Calibration for free using your DSLR", which describes using a DSLR to calibrate a monitor. It's not exactly a one-click-and-everything-is-perfect setup, but it seems to work..

The Datacolor Spyder series seem to be about the most popular monitor calibration probe, and are quite reasonably priced (about $150USD according to froogle.com)

At the last place I worked, they used (well, originally developed!) cineSpace for monitor-profiling/calibration - although it's not exactly cheap, from here, "Pricing for cineSpace starts at 1,000.00 USD for a basic cineSpace license package". cineSpace is likely overkill for what you are doing, although you do mention your machine having a nVidia Quadro card which implies some form of high-end visual "stuff"..

In short, try doing it by eye (or using a DSLR). If that doesn't work, look into the Spyder 3.

Answer 2

As I'm sure you know, monitor calibration is one of the blackest of the black arts of modern computing. I do a lot of photo retouching and video special FX work and I spend way too much of my time worrying whether what I'm seeing is what I'm getting! My recommendation would be a hardware solution of some kind: software only solutions are really not much better than guesswork combined with trial-and-error. A lot of the studios I work in have four-figure price calibration solutions (and five-figure price monitors!), but for home use, I have a DataColor Spyder 3 Pro which cost me about £110 in the UK. A friend uses a Pantone Huey Pro which I think was about £90. There is also a cheaper Huey. I can personally highly recommend the Spyder: since I got it, my monitors stay beautifully in sync and I spend a LOT less time worrying and fiddling about.