What's the best colour callibrator?

[multiweb (Marc)]

Originally Posted by troypiggo

Not sure what the beef is, but we are talking about colour calibration and settings here. If you've interpreted that as shilling PI, that says more about you than us.

That's an extra pack of six for you, right there.

[gregbradley]

Sorry Greg. FWIW I've had the Spyder 2 and 3. Very happy.[/QUOTE]

Thanks Troy.

I settled on the Colour Munki as it was cheaper and actually rated slightly better than the Spyder so on paper it sounds good. I liked the fact its easy to use and scored a very high score for colour accuracy after calibration. But any would be an improvement over doing it by eye with a laptop screen.

Greg.

[glend (Glen)]

Greg's original question: "I have upgraded my monitor now I need a physical colour callibrator."

[troypiggo (Troy)]

And the thread evolved into colour management with colour profiles developed from calibration hardware. A natural and relevant digression, and on topic.

Nothing further from me on your tangent.

[troypiggo (Troy)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Thanks Troy.

I settled on the Colour Munki as it was cheaper and actually rated slightly better than the Spyder so on paper it sounds good. I liked the fact its easy to use and scored a very high score for colour accuracy after calibration. But any would be an improvement over doing it by eye with a laptop screen.

Greg.

That's the main thing. I came to the conclusion that as long as your use some form of calibration hardware, any of the above-mentioned, you're on the right track. Any differences would be almost negligible to the difference between no calibration and calibrated.

[RickS (Rick)]

I think the main difference between the low cost calibrators is the ease of use of the bundled software. They are all basic colorimeters with adequate accuracy.

The higher end (more expensive) devices are spectrophotometers and make measurements at a larger number of wavelengths. That's useful if you want to do printer profiles but probably overkill for monitor calibration.

Cheers,
Rick.

[Garbz (Chris)]

Thanks Rick for your earlier post. There's nothing wrong with assuming a colour profile of the monitor, it's just the first time that I've seen this as the default action where every other program out there assumes one of the standard profiles and then simply converts the output to match the profile of the calibrator.

In any case we're slowly getting to the point where colour management is becoming native enough that we don't need to do it. We're not far these days from being able to send anything to anyone and having them correctly display it :-)

[RickS (Rick)]

Originally Posted by Garbz

In any case we're slowly getting to the point where colour management is becoming native enough that we don't need to do it. We're not far these days from being able to send anything to anyone and having them correctly display it :-)

I'm not that optimistic, Chris

There are still a bunch of sites, e.g. Astrobin, that strip ICC profiles from images they display. There are still browsers and image display utilities that don't do colour management or turn it off by default. There are lots of default monitor profiles that don't match screens.

I just posted a poll with an image that displays dramatically differently with/without colour management. It won't prove anything but hopefully it will be entertaining: http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...d.php?t=136481

Cheers,
Rick.

[Garbz (Chris)]

Originally Posted by RickS

I'm not that optimistic, Chris

We're a whole world better than we were 10 years ago.

My personal favourite is Chrome which will colour manage only tagged images, but do so for the monitor profile. So if you have a colour calibrator and a monitor with an abnormal gamut Chrome will display a standard sRGB image and an image with the sRGB ICC profile embedded differently.

This actually caused me grief after the last astrofest where I posted a picture that everyone said looked too hot, but looked fine on my computer.

[gregbradley]

I got the Color Munki. Easy to use which is a plus. I have a question though.

Do colour callibrators check for colour accuracy only not the level of saturation?

So could the colours be correct but your monitor shows the colours as too saturated?

Greg.

[RickS (Rick)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Do colour callibrators check for colour accuracy only not the level of saturation?

So could the colours be correct but your monitor shows the colours as too saturated?

Calibration should cover hue, saturation and brightness. It won't help with applications that aren't colour managed, so you may still see stuff that doesn't look right.

Cheers,
Rick.