monitor calibration

Chris Perry

Chris Perry

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Chris
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Hi People, can anyone suggest a way to get my monitor calibrated, that doesn’t involve buying a kit? Just wondering if there is a firm out there, that will come round and do it.

Cheers
Chris
 
As a kit for doing it starts at £69 ish for a Syder express. It needs doing on a fairly regular basis I think you are going to be hard pushed to find a firm to pop round and do it :)
 
Cyclops said:
As a kit for doing it starts at £69 ish for a Syder express. It needs doing on a fairly regular basis I think you are going to be hard pushed to find a firm to pop round and do it :)
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I never quite understand why people say you should do it often. Surely unless lighting in your room changes, you change graphics cards? But other than that, the outputted colours aren't going to change themselves over time. :thinking:

Anyway on topic - I believe there is a topic on these forums somewhere where a kind person is letting people borrow his spyder calibrator.
 
Wigster said:
I never quite understand why people say you should do it often. Surely unless lighting in your room changes, you change graphics cards? But other than that, the outputted colours aren't going to change themselves over time. :thinking:
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Temperature, age, how often it's switched on & off all impact the calibration.

The quality of the monitor, and it's internal components, all affect how much the calibration will drift.
 
Cheers for the advice, looks like i'll have to shell out for a kit! well at least i'll have one when i need one :-)
 
My local camera club has a club Spyder which gets passed around the members.
I'm not suggesting you join specially, but if you are already a club member then maybe they do something similar :)
 
Wigster said:
But other than that, the outputted colours aren't going to change themselves over time.
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Oh yes they would. On CRTs that may happen even within a week and needs tuning. On LCDs it is less so but still they are fluctuating over time. The LCD produce colour by passing the backlight light via coloured filters controlled by liquid crystals: the more transparent it is at each dot the more backlighting light goes through and hence the brighter the pixel. This backlighting has a white coloured light each of its own colour temperature but this temperature and hence the light colour deviates over time. In most cases it goes dimmer and gets more yellow. Hence the need of regular re-profiling. It is not as frequent as with CRTs though and I'd say once a month is probably enough for most needs.
 
There are a couple of websites that have a series of colour and brightness gradiants where you adjust your monitor until you can see the differences distinctly - before anyone says it, I know it's not as good as a proper calibration but at least it gives you an idea of whether the screen is too bright or not which was my biggest problem when trying to correctly expose shots in PP.
 
Quick Gamma isn't too shabby for a free download.
 
incapete said:
There are a couple of websites that have a series of colour and brightness gradiants where you adjust your monitor until you can see the differences distinctly - before anyone says it, I know it's not as good as a proper calibration but at least it gives you an idea of whether the screen is too bright or not which was my biggest problem when trying to correctly expose shots in PP.
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The incapete is right those are great to get you at least started. For example QuickGamma is free and great to get you started before you start acquiring more expensive hardware...
 
Google is your best friend...
 
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