SURVEY - Monitor Calibration and Profiling

[steve.ledger]

I suspect many of us are using LCD/TFT screens that are incable of showing the difference..

Paul

Untrue

In any case people, the point of the survey is to establish who has used hardware calibration to setup their monitor profiles to match their printing output.
It's an important question and one that I think deserves to be taken a bit seriously here. I don't really care if you can't see the rectangles from infront, above below or behind your monitor or wonder how big they should be... The image was just an intro to the subject.

For a graphics community that often needs to take their work to a pro printer, or even print themsleves, profiling is very important in maintaining consistancy, I would have thought shown a bit more interest in this subject.

Photographers who outsource the printing always calibrate thier monitors to the ICC profile of their printer. Good quality LCD monitors with wide viewing angles using IPS technology for their panels are every bit as good as high quality CRT's were. I know pro photographers who use LCD's and achieve perfect matches in their print outputs.

[Soquili]

I do not use much printed output, so I may not be typical of the community here at TG.

Printing to an HP 970c Deskjet the colours match my LCD and CRT monitors.

Printing to a Lexmark X2500 the colours are not always accurate. However the printer is very cheap and no where near top of the line. Usefull only for composition, but not colour proofs.

Printing to a Sharp MX-3501N laser printer the colours match my LCD and CRT monitors.

No ICC profiles, no hardware calibration other than eyeballs and video card settings of a slight tweak of gamma and brightness.

[handrawn]

I have a philips 170C flat screen - I do not know offhand if it is IPS technology or not, but it is very good.
Moving to a flat screen was one of the best things I ever did - my eyes never took well to CRT, heck even TV gives me eye [and brain ] strain these days.

Absolute color fidelity is not usually a major factor in my graphics work which is mostly cartoons.
With your example Sledger the white boxes on the left are fine - the black boxes are more difficult.
The link you supplied is a good one - my monitor passed the test there fine.
I used the manufacturer's own software to calibrate and set the CM in windows to sRGB profile. The monitor is on 6500K and the brightness and contrast are both set at 18 out of 100.
I have no idea if all this is 'right' as it is not my field - but it appears to work [so far]

[RushNP774]

I can't see any difference between the two lightest whites, nor the two darkest blacks. I'm sure it would help in my post processing of my photography, but I'm not a pro, so I've just never bothered with calibration Once I get my new computer and monitors, I'll probably be more inclined to make sure I have perfect colors.

[Burpee]

Hardware calibration. No, I don't use any hardware to calibrate.

Today at www.giveawayoftheday.com (3 hours left) they are giveing away some calibrating software. I chose not to download it either. Mostly because it guarantees to calibrate your monitor to 2.2 gamma and 6500 warmth and I thought that 2.2 gamma was a Mac setting and that PCs should be calibrated to 1.8....but I don't know for sure.

I'm really lost with all of this. I don't understand how to use a profile for my printer even after reading about it numerous threads (never seen the steps to take to do it). I bought a ViewSonic Graphics Series G90fb. The 'b' means that it's black This monitor was suggested to me by the owner of a 3D site. I love it. It came with custom settings for different temperatures. I chose 6500.

It used to print out from my computer what I saw on screen. I had to lighten my work just a touch but the colors were good. Now they aren't and my colors are off when I print...especially reds.

I used to have an ATI Radeon graphics card but it died and I replaced it with a NVidia GeForce 7900Gt (something like that). Could a new graphics card make the difference?

[handrawn]

according to my adobe software: 2.2 for Windows 1.8 for Mac Nancy

if you change your graphics card you might well change your default monitor color profile...

[Burpee]

I'll have to reread my bookmarked sites. I'm easily confused, lol. I'm set at about 2.0 gamma on a PC at the mo...right in between. My blue gamma is set just a touch lower than the red and green. Feel like I should reset everything to default and use an image and print it out until it matches my printer to screen.

[Albacore]

Most of the cheaper LCD's are not good with greyscales but can be quite reasonable in colour. With the price I paid I can't see a defined black rectangle at the righthand end. I take the works Pantone thing home from which you place on the screen about once every 2 months to check calibration and there is always some tweaks to be done. I use custom colour profiles for the two printers I use so that I can get a good approx from screen to print. It took me two years of tweaking to get that for the full range of colours and then of course a bought a new computer but this is when the works pantone I think it is called Huey Pro or X Crawler.

[RTK]

To increase the response time of LCDs, the manufaturers often lower the gamut from 8 bits to 6 bits on your average/and many "sort of higher end" consumer LCDs.

Didn't know this at the time when I bought my Samsung 226bw - things just seemed slightly off (coming from a good CRT), so I went looking, after the purchase.

The monitor is not bad at all for every day use, or vector drawing and gaming (2 ms), but it doesn't seem to be "all there" for photos (but hey, maybe proper calibration tools would help (never done that --- eyeballs only).

When I upgrade my oldest box, my Samsung monitor goes there.

As for the example --- can't see the difference between the two darkest squares. Not necessarily a monitor issue, as I'm also blind as a bat.

A bit more about the 6bit / 8bit issue here:

http://compreviews.about.com/od/mult...a/LCDColor.htm

Risto

[Egg Bramhill]

Sledger,

I'm a bit peeved that you dismissed my valid point so lightly as non important. I was making a serious point. Without guides to the rectangles how does anyone viewing your original attachment know if the first 2 left or right hand sides are visibly different or not?

In the attachment below I can see a visible difference between the 2 left side rectangles on the Greater grid. However someone else with a different monitor may see it as the Lesser view, but still would see the left side rectangle as white, therefore how, without the grid lines, would they know the difference?

I'm not being facetious. I'm making a valid point based on your original posting.