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Eye-One vs the others
rutt
Registered Users Posts: 6,511 Major grins
Monitor calibration sounds great in theory. Plug in the gizmo, run the software, bingo, the world looks the same on your monitor as on your prints and the monitors of every else who is a member of the calibrated monitor club. No subjective decisions as in the built in apple and adobe monitor calibration programs.
In practice, I've found it to be very hit or miss. I had a really bad experience a few years ago with a Huey. Sometimes it worked OK, but sometimes not. So I bought a Spyder 2 which worked better but I got bad results this summer with a 24" ACD (too warm.) So I thought I'd rereview the Huey and bought a new Huey Pro. In short, it sucked. The results were plainly green on all displays I tried.
Then I tried an Eye-One. This finally seems like a product better than manual calibration. Worked easily on all my displays and they now at least look like they are on the same planet in terms of color temperature. One cannot expect perfection here, because different monitors are very different and prints are really different. But being on the same planet is good.
Summing up: the Eye-One was the first thing I tried that was worth the money.
In practice, I've found it to be very hit or miss. I had a really bad experience a few years ago with a Huey. Sometimes it worked OK, but sometimes not. So I bought a Spyder 2 which worked better but I got bad results this summer with a 24" ACD (too warm.) So I thought I'd rereview the Huey and bought a new Huey Pro. In short, it sucked. The results were plainly green on all displays I tried.
Then I tried an Eye-One. This finally seems like a product better than manual calibration. Worked easily on all my displays and they now at least look like they are on the same planet in terms of color temperature. One cannot expect perfection here, because different monitors are very different and prints are really different. But being on the same planet is good.
Summing up: the Eye-One was the first thing I tried that was worth the money.
If not now, when?
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Eye-One display 2. I had good luck with the spyder until it met that ACD 24".
I don't really know, but I suspect there is more black art in the design of these things and their software than you might think. From the little I know about color matching, it's much more complex than you might imagine. Our eyes don't see "spectral color" and there are many different combinations of light which will appear the same to us. There is some bizarre but well established experiment which shows that any three differently colored lights can be combined in a way which appears to match any spectral color (although a spectrometer will not see it that way.)
Makes one's head spin.
But, I think you used the right word (referenced the right machine) in your description - but I'm not sure. Hmmmmm
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That's for sure.
With all the advances we've had in technology and software, I find it frustrating that I can capture a good photo, do amazing things in post processing, but have it fall completely apart during the print process.
I have a Huey Pro and I guess I'm among the few that aren't having serious color shift problems. Things look good on my monitor, look good on others' monitors, but printing can be a crap shoot. Sometimes perfect, other times way off the mark ...
For me spending a couple hundred dollars for monitor calibration seems reasonable, but it seems we take a quantum jump when we go to the complete scan/monitor/printer calibration.
It would be nice for this technology to be much more mainstream ...
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Interesting, John.
I used a Spyder2 to calibrate my 24 in Apple Cinema Display for several years with what I feel is excellent results, and that matches my present 30 in ACD and a 19 in Gateway LCD as well. Prints match my screens to my eye under an Ott light at least.
Is this video card related, or what do you think? I have considered upgrading to a Color Munki or an EYE one, but have not so far, because what I have does not seem broken and not need to be fixed just yet.
I will continue to watch this isssue.
Does the EYE one allow making printing profiles as well as calibrating monitors?
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Maybe the Spyder deteriorated. Or the monitor? Or me?
I have run into this even with conventional monitors. Generally I find problem images are ones with bright and saturated reds, greens or blues. Lets take blue as an example: to get the most saturated blue your screen cranks the blue channel up to max which makes the color very bright. However, when your printer wants to make a very saturated blue, it uses its highest density of both cyan and magenta making the color relatively dark. So then, when the color space conversion sees a bright blue in your source image, it has to make a choice when sending it to your printer; either it renders it less saturated or it renders it darker or it shifts the hue (toward cyan because less magenta makes it brighter) from the color you saw on your screen.
For problem images I generally have an opinion about how I'd like that color renders, but very little control over the color space conversion. I end up spending a lot of time tweaking the brightness and saturation of the problems colors while looking at print previews in Photoshop and printing 4x6 test prints until I get it to fall the way I want it to. In the end I get an image optimized to print with a specific printer& paper profile because with a different profile it can easliy fall another way.