Yow! I just spent SEVERAL HOURS doing color calibration on 3 Samsung 213T LCD monitors. (#4 hasn't arrived yet.)
Silly me, I thought, hey, they're LCDs, they're going to match right out the box, right?
Wrong.
Who'd of thunk that I'd be screwing around with a colorimeter for a programming/trading workstation? :)
The three monitors that I have, at their default settings, vary from 5300K to 6200K. The spec is 6500K. The difference is enough that greys look distinctly pinkish on the 5300K one. The luminance also varies considerably, and the non-linear brightness adjustment doesn't help. With the weakest display at 80 (the default) I had to drop the brightest one to 40 (!) to match it. Kick the weakest one up to 95, though, and the brightest only has to go down to 86 to match...
To add insult to injury, when using a DVI interface, there's nothing on the monitor you can adjust other than brightness.
(When using an analog interface, you can adjust color temperature, contrast, and RGB brightness.)
I used the manual colorimeter function in the Optical software to set the brightness on all 3 monitors using their brightness controls to about 50 fL. (You want to set it high, because the gamma curve can only adjust it downward. After calibration, they are all around 40 fL).
So, I had to find out how to do this with software.
Two trial-ware programs turned out to be indepensible: PowerStrip and UltraMon.
PowerStrip allows you to view and adjust oodles of stuff about your display card(s) and monitor(s). The most important feature is that you can apply color correction to each monitor seperately.
UltraMon is a great multi-monitor utility. It's similar to the window-placement software that usually comes with multi-monitor cards, but I think much nicer. It's most nifty feature is a "Smart Start Bar" that it can put at the bottom of secondary monitors that shows icons for only those applications that are resident on a given monitor.
Anyhoo, it became quickly apparent that I wasn't going to be able to adjust-out the differences between the monitors by eye and using the controls built in to PowerStrip. PowerStrip can apply custom gamma ramps, though - you just need a way to create them.
The way to create them turns out to be using a Pantone Colorvision Spyder. This is a little USB colorimeter with 7 different color sensors that you hang over the edge of your monitor. (For CRTs, it attaches with suction cups.) There are two versions of the package - I opted for the "Pro" version, that comes with the more powerful Optical calibration software.
The software is crude and poorly documented, to say the least. And even the "deluxe" Optical isn't able to handle multiple monitors on one system. I had to figure out how to fake it out. Basically, I had to disable to start-up program that they install, and use PowerStrip instead. There is some trickery involved in having PowerStrip capture the gamma curve after each monitor calibration to store in it's own format. On my system, Optical insists on applying the correction to my first and third monitors. ("Officially", it is supposed to apply it to all of them - which, of course, isn't what I want either...) It took a LOT of fiddling to figure out the right sequence of operations.
Biggest problem is that this software just wasn't designed for this task. It is narrowly-focused on graphics creation. (Never mind that people use multiple monitors for graphics creation...) They go out of their way to provide a way to match multiple monitors on DIFFERENT computers, though...
To do the calibration, you dangle the Spyder over your screen, and place it over an area that the software displays. It then goes through various levels of RGB, measuring them with the Spyder.
It's an expensive solution to what seems like a trivial problem. But I spend enough time in front of my computer that this was going to drive me absolutely bonkers if not fixed.
If you run multiple monitors, and mismatched colors and brightness are driving you nuts, the expense may be worth it. If you work in a big company, or know people in the industry, you might want to seek-out a PhotoShop guru who has ones of these toys, and become very, very good friends. :)
BTW, I found the easiest test for how well matched your monitors are is a pretty simple one: First, set a plain grey background for your desktop. Then, open up a copy of Notepad and spread it across all of your monitors. The grey screen background, white background in Notepad, and the "straw" color background color are particularly good at ferreting-out differences. What you see just might horrify you into learning more than you want to know about color-matching monitors. |
