Who calibrates their screen

IMHO it's probably THE most important thing to do if editing/printing photos...one thing to be aware of too is that not all PC monitors are equal, the cheaper TN panels don't display colours particularly accurately, IPS, S-IPS, PVA are a better option

simon

Remco I really don't doubt that it work it's just that at the momemnt I'm happy how my prints compare to the screen. If I would get a calibration tool for my screen most likely my printer will not be comparable to my screen anymore so I should need to calibrate that one aswell.
There are kits so if you buy a calibration tool for your monitor and printer you get also the things needed to make a colour profile for your camera.
You need to shoot a colour card and from that you make a colour profile, they are quite cheap I believe so worth the extra money in my eyes.

So you've a camera that capture the colours correctly, and you then have a screen that shows the colours your camera capture corretly and a printer that prints the colours correct as well. So going through the whole cycle the print should have the same colour as the real product.
Only if you can archive that I think it's worth to get a calibration tool, or else you'll always have a weak link in the cycle.

Hi Stefan,

Your comments are perhaps valid if talking about home printing but if sending prints to a lab/online print company it's important to have confidence that your images are as you hope...the internet is full of complaints from people critising labs etc for poor quality prints when in many cases its actually their own workflow that's at fault

Considering how much people spend on cameras/lenses etc etc the costs of a decent calibration device is relatively insignificant and will definitely help make sure you reap the full benefits of all that cash spend on equipment !!

Simon

I check my monitor every 3 or 4 weeks with the calibration tool in PSP, but I don't know how good it is. (computers aint my thing) It would be interesting to find out if any other PSP users have any views on this.

Yes Simon that's a very fair point but I've printed some inlargement with several shops and somehow they all seem to have the printer calibrated differendly so don't know if you can always blame you monitor.
At home you've full controll so I'll keep doing it at home for that simple reason.
Also some users don't even have a decent monitor, I'm probable one of the few still working an a CRT. I'm still looking for a wide screen HD CRT but didn't found one so far.

I also just found what seems a good priting shop in Den Haag so will test them maybe. I hope they have some interaction with you so that you can first watch the print on a screen before they print it, they are decent in price with their pro-prints so we will wait and see.

I very, very rarely print my photographs at home, but in the past I noticed that my prints were totally different when printed in a lab. This changed when I went to a fantastic professional lab based in Oxfordshire. They advised me to calibrate all my computers as they were sure my screens were slightly out.



Simon you are spot on and this is the main reason I calibrate. I started to write something regarding printing labs then I read your comment.

It's even more important that I calibrate both my PC and my laptop as I have a professional printer (Olmec 1000) that I take to events, this has to be calibrated as well. With all these calibrated I know that I will get the true colour.


Paul

I calibrate my screen with a Huey and ArgyllCMS (under Linux I have no option to use the original software, so Argyll it is. Seems to work).

Since I became concerned that my colours were wrong, I have done two things to correct the problem:

1. Bought a Huey and used it
2. Bought a PVA based monitor

If I could afford to do one of the above but not both, I'd take the monitor every time. The Huey basically just made my old TN panel even worse, everything on screen looked green and the prints came out magenta. The PVA panel (an HP 1955) is darned near spot on out of the box, with the only obvious change on calibrating being to drop the brightness a little. Compared to prints off my HP printer or from Dlab7, the HP screen looks a little bright as you might expect from a backlit medium but is otherwise spot on. It is the single best piece of photography equipment I have bought since I got my first DSLR.

My Samsung Syncmaster 173T shows a very good picture at default settings, without any tweaking at all. When grey scales appear on a web site, I can spot all tones of grey, including black and white.

The colours look OK to me, and prints returned from my online service look as expected.

So why should I spend a lot of time and money on calibrating tools?

@Stefan, the sad thing is that it is allmost impossible to get a decent CRT these days. To my knowledge all large manufacturers have stopped producing CRT's in the last few years.
About 3 years ago we bought a new TV and there were only two CRT's left in the store. I still bought the CRT because at that price level there wasn't a single LCD which came close.
For my PC I first switched a couple of years ago to a TFT display only to find that it was crap.
I then started using my CRT again (wonderfull IIyama visionmaster pro 450).

The problem is that on my desk the display is to close to your eyes so they start hurting after a while. It took me hours and hours to search for a affordable TFT with a good panel (S-IPS) and finally I settled for my current NEX 20WGX2pro which is a 20" 16:10 panel with a 1650x1050 resolution.

Remco, it's indeed a shame. For the price level they deliver the best colour. I've looked into a TFT but only found a Philips i believe and a HP which is up to what I want. I have a blu-ray burner in the PC so want to be able to show Full HD and 1650x1050 isn't good enough for that.

I think I wait till the leds, laser, fed or sed screens come to the market for the right price. I think I will skip compeletly TFT.

ps I just read that the FED research is completely stopped
Laser tv is still alive though you can buy one if you want, the Mitsubishi LaserVue TV $6,999.
Laser tv can produce 90% of the colors visible to the human eye, sounds good enough to me.

Well, the recent developments in LCD technology look very good as well.
LED backlight combined with 5 or 6 colour LCD displays.
Current displays have 3 colours per pixel the new generations will feature 5 or 6.
In the 5 colour displays they have added yellow and magenta because those are the two most difficult colours to reproduce on a display.
I don't know which colour is added in the 6 colour LCD panel

I didn't knew that, maybe the 6 colour would be cyan, that makes most sence.
Lets see what the future will bring, my CRT is still running fine ^^

Worth to say that loudly, don't use TN panels if you are thinking of working with colour (means more than just a basic, casual). TNs are the worst option, you will quite easily find that i.e. colour temperature will have significant diferences in different places on the panel, so the colour will not be consistent across the panel (may be 6500K in one place, few inches further it may be 5500K, brightnes may differ, ...), terrible bad "angles", you move your head a bit away from the usual point and colours cre changing , etc, calibrating may help a bit (if you will keep your head always in the same position in front of the monitor ), but may make the final effect "not better" (depends on luck in getting better copy of TN pannel, they may even differ in within series).
IPS/PVA pannels are much better for colour work by definition, but still there will be worse and better ones.
Another thing wort to mention is if you are doing "hardware calibration", so changing stuff in monitor's LUT table, TN's usually have a 6-bit per color LUT, it means that posterization will happen even more offten, typical IPS/PVA may have 8-bit, good ones have 10 or even 12 bit (per colour) LUT, as well as good ones may be pre-calibrated (linear) in factory, have you ever wondered why good Eizo/NEC costs much more than others, that is part of the answer.

One day I'll look up what all these TLAs* mean...

*(three letter acronyms)

CRT Cathode ray tube
TFT Thin-film transistor
TN twisted nematic
IPS in-plane switching
MVA multi-domain vertical alignment
PVA patterned vertical alignment
FED field emission display
SED surface-conduction electron-emitter display
LUT Lookup table

Hmmm I don't think it's very usefull Womble