Calibrating monitor?

[EmyB]

I've got a plain old Dell monitor. How do I "calibrate" it, as I've seen mentioned around the place.

When I print my photos at home, they always come out quite dark (so I have to "over-brighten" them on my screen to compensate). I don't know if that's a monitor problem or a printer problem.

Cheers!

[Doug Pardee]

You need to buy (and use, of course) a calibrator. Some of the popular brands include Spyder, Eye One, and ColorMunki.

[EmyB]

Thankyou for your reply. And how do they work?? Do they install software?? Do they plug directly to the monitor somehow? Do they take a reading of the light your monitor is emitting??

Either way, I'm not sure I can justify the cost - they're a few hundred dollars aren't they? I wish I could just take my monitor somewhere and they calibrate it for me for 40 bucks or something! Hehehe.

[Tzetsin]

as for the brightness thing.

your monitor is too bright, so when it looks right on the monitor, its dark on the printer.

What you can do to solve this is take a sheet of paper, in nuetral light, and set your monitor brightness to match the brightness of the paper. Just dont hold the paper up to the monitor because it'll never look right that way. just look at the paper, and then over to the monitor and guestimate

[Doug Pardee]

Originally Posted by EmyB

how do they work?? Do they install software?? Do they plug directly to the monitor somehow? Do they take a reading of the light your monitor is emitting??

They have a pickup device, sometimes called a "puck", that you dangle over the front of your screen during calibration. The puck reads the color and brightness of the light coming from the screen. The calibrator software sends out a range of brightness and color settings, asks the puck what the screen is actually showing, and creates a LUT (look-up table) for your video card to produce the correct brightness curves.

they're a few hundred dollars aren't they?

I don't know about AUD. Here in the US, we can get the less expensive ones for under USD$100. If you're going to do photo editing on your computer, you need one.

I wish I could just take my monitor somewhere and they calibrate it for me for 40 bucks or something!

Calibration is only good for a few weeks. Monitor brightness tends to drift, and you should recalibrate at least monthly if you're at all picky about the results you get. It's not something you can do just one time. If it were, you could just borrow a calibrator from someone.

And by the way, it's not "the monitor" that gets calibrated. The video card in the computer is what gets calibrated to provide a proper conversion between data values and monitor output.

Note: if you have an inexpensive TN type LCD monitor, calibrating those can prove particularly difficult. The less-expensive units might not be up to the task. The MVA/PVA and IPS type LCDs usually calibrate very nicely.

[~AJ~]

Someone mentioned the other day that LCD monitors don't need to be calibrated - anyone know if that's true?

[Doug Pardee]

LCD monitors need calibrating even worse than CRT monitors do. CRT monitors can often be made half-way usable by software-and-eyeball calibration such as Adobe Gamma; LCD monitors can't. The inexpensive TN LCDs are really nasty color-wise and sometimes can't be calibrated acceptably at all, even with hardware calibrators.

[Matthias099]

Originally Posted by Doug Pardee

Note: if you have an inexpensive TN type LCD monitor, calibrating those can prove particularly difficult. The less-expensive units might not be up to the task. The MVA/PVA and IPS type LCDs usually calibrate very nicely.

How do you know which one you have? Sorry for my ignorance . . . .

[EmyB]

Thanks for all your advice, especially Doug!

I'm looking at buying the Spyder 3 Express. I'm hoping it will be useful for at least 5 years (and through my next computer/monitor upgrade) but I read somewhere that you can only use it on one computer, it forces you to register and then it won't work with any other computer... is that right? Does anyone know?

[JFSanders]

Originally Posted by Matthias099

How do you know which one you have? Sorry for my ignorance . . . .

Almost all LCD monitors are of the TN type. And they are insanely expensive with the notable exception of the Dell ultra sharp u2410 they are well into the $1000 and WAAAY up range. So most likely yours is a TN.

Jim