Digital Home Thoughts: Pixel Perfect Colour: The Spyder2Pro Studio from ColorVision

The Proof is in the Pixels

Figure 3: This is the screen where you see the baseline image and can toggle between the before and after.

The test photo shows a variety of images (full-sized image) to give you a good idea of how the changed profile impacts different subjects. There's a Switch button that allows you to toggle between before the calibration and after. There's no doubt about it, there was a very noticeable difference. It allowed me to see differences all the way up the grey to white strip, although it didn't help much with the deep blacks – the last three steps are pure black. LCD monitors are often criticized for their inability to display the subtleties of black shading, but this is the first time I've actually noticed it. The various skin tones were vastly improved by the calibration – the before setting had them all looking washed out, while the calibrated setting gave them a rich tone. I was less convinced with the Windows user-interface colours however – it's hard to describe, and not something that can be shown in a screenshot, but somehow the grey background of the calibration program looks a bit magenta tinted. It's subtle, but I'm not sure if it's better. There's a particularly interesting note in the help file for this screen:

"This setting is not necessarily how your monitor looked before calibration, as some other Look Up Table may have been in use previously, such as one that accompanied a vendor supplied profile for your monitor."

This brings up an interesting point: the preview shown as the "before calibration" is the monitor with no color profile applied. Most monitors come with some sort of color profile, so this before and after is only a fair comparison if your monitor had no color settings applied to begin with. In the case of my HP laptop, there was no color profile loaded by default, yet the before preview seemed much worse than the colour I was used to seeing from this LCD. This makes it more than a little difficult to judge how much better the calibrated monitor is.

After showing you a summary of the profile created, the software takes you to a final screen where I was looking for the word "Exit" or "Finish". I didn't find either, so I clicked next and the entire process restarted from the beginning. Keeping in mind that this is a 20 minute process, I was a bit frustrated at having to go through it all again.

The ColorVision software is unintuitive and, frankly, a bit flaky: I uninstalled a Java-based program (LogMeIn) and rebooted, and after doing so the ColorVision app suddenly lost the calibration profile. Since I needed to fix this, I noticed then that the application never installed shortcuts to the profile selector in my Start menu – they were on my desktop, which I deleted expecting them to be in my Start menu. I had to dig into the Program Files folder to find the program I needed to run in order to select the colour profile I wanted. A bit frustrating!

Conclusions
After using a colour-calibrated monitor for a couple of weeks now, I’m not convinced this is something everyone needs to do. I suppose if you have a cheap monitor that’s badly out of whack when it comes to color accuracy, some would say this would be a good investment – but why would anyone spend several hundred dollars on colour calibration software if they had a cheap monitor? Myself, I’d recommend you buy a new monitor instead. Ultimately, I'm put in a position I don't recall being in before with a review: a completely neutral opinion about the product. If I had two of the same laptops and could do some real A/B testing, I might have a different opinion, but ultimately I feel rather vague about this product.

[I]Jason Dunn is the President of Thoughts Media and the Executive Editor of Pocket PC Thoughts, Smartphone Thoughts, and Digital Media Thoughts. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and enjoys photography, reading, and computer gaming (when he has the time).