Monitor Calibration

by Steve Eshom

For years I’ve understood that color calibration of the monitor was a necessary thing to really ensure what you are seeing is really accurate.  I of course putoff purchasing a color calibrator due to the cost.  In its place I used things like Adobe Gamma, Quickgamma, and DisplayMate to manually adjust my montior to what I thought was a decent calibration.  Looking back, the results I got were acceptable.

For Christmas I recieved a Pantone Huey.  Huey is not a professional monitor calibrator, in fact it is not even an amateur tool, it is truly a consumer grade device.  All that aside, I have to say it works.  After installing the software, I plugged it into a free USB port and calibrated my Dell flat panel and in just a few minutes.  Simple.

Did I notice a drastic change?  Not really, though my wife and daughter both claim the colors appear richer.  Where did I see the biggest difference?  Well, I spent lots of time calibrating the monitor manually to ensure the darkest darks and the whitest whites appeared correctly.  Apparently I was close but didn’t get it quite right and with the Huey both adjustments look much better.

In the end I think the whole concept of calibation is worth the effort.  Whether you decide to spend for a high end color calibration tool or something simple like Huey, the results are much improved over manual methods.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 1:58 pm and is filed under general info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.