Bother with calibrating display?
polycounter lvl 5
I know there's some threads on this, but displays have gotten better over the years and I think it's due for another discussion. In a team environment it's probably a no brainer, but as a solo game artist I'm wondering if I need to bother with it.
My budget Dell IPS seems to have pretty accurate colors, but who am I to judge-- I even work with f.lux on sometimes, because it all seems relative.
My budget Dell IPS seems to have pretty accurate colors, but who am I to judge-- I even work with f.lux on sometimes, because it all seems relative.
Replies
It still matters. You want a monitor with as close to perfect calibration, because monitors are created around that standard. If your monitor is off when making a project, and someone viewing your art has a poorly calibrated monitor as well, it can create extreme differences.
Do you need one with all the bells and whistles? I've seen some that don't measure brightness and contrast, which seems doable on your own with software. Also some that don't measure ambient light-- which I don't understand either, since your ambient light changes throughout the day anyway if you have a window.
re:ambient light, you should calibrate it in the light that you're most often in.
I would get one that measures brightness, contrast, and ambient light, yes. Also some of the lower end ones do not support more than one monitor, so if you're running a dual setup, make sure it does.
Interested to hear your guys thoughts on that actually. I mean I've been pushing calibration as a good thing but I can't argue with the results - in this particular case it just looks worse to the eye...
That said, higher end panels tend to require calibration less, or rather the impact is much less obvious than with lower end panels. I calibrated all my screens here and noticed a small but visible improvement, and then I calibrated the awful TN panel on my wife's laptop and saw a HUGE improvement. Using a Spyder 4 elite so nothing particularly fancy.
Its also possible that a super high end monitor that is factory calibrated is going to be calibrated more accurately than what a normal panel and a entry level hardware calibrator will give you. I expect this is the case with your Eizo.
There is also a subjective quality. A lot of displays are tuned to be a little warmer, which tends to be a bit nicer to look at. I find when I calibrate screens they tend to look a bit cool at first, but this is relative to the overly warm color monitors tend to have by default (Which I actually prefer a bit as well).
Also, I've had better luck the better the screen is. If its a 6-bit e-IPS screen, its not going to look as good as a 8/10bit proper IPS panel. Some the HP IPS panels are 6-bit e-IPS panels, so it probably depends on exactly which screens you guys are running.
So we're running HP LP2475w and HP ZR2440w as primary displays, think they are 8-bit H-IPS. The visual inaccuracies I'm talking about are more that with default, manufacturer calibration on these displays... white pixels (255,255,255 sRGB) look white. Whereas after calibration (using Spyder4 Elite) the same pixels have a noticeably blue tint to them, to the eye.
Now - considering this is work for videogames not print ... we're looking at reproduction on another digital display here. So does it make sense to aim for the "calibration" which visually displays on the monitor more correctly to what the data is? I mean sure that means that every different monitor model is going to have somewhat different results ... I guess what I'm getting at is that, is consistant calibration still desirable when it means the colour reproduction on your team's monitors is consistently "more wrong" than the default calibrations which reproduce more accurately BUT more inconsistently between monitor models?
disclaimer: I would not be surprised if our skewed calibration results were the result of us "doing it wrong" ... can't say we've exactly had Datacolor in to show us how to do it correctly so this is definitely a possibility.
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1168121&highlight=calibrated
I've noticed the blue whites thing, initially after correcting the color in my experience has tended to look cooler, but again I think this is due to the natural warm calibration that most monitors have. In my experience its not really that it is actually blue but that it looks cooler compare to the default calibration. Now, without seeing your screens, I can't really tell you much, its possible yours are calibrating towards the blue tint, and you might be able to tweak your calibration settings a bit to account for that.
It depends on how off you think it is as well. If its just slightly off, but all of the screens in house are closely matched, thats probably still a good thing.
One thing you should probably do is set up a proofing station, where you have a variety of uncalibrated screens of various quality and price. If you notice a trend where on all of those panels your artwork appears warmer or something, thats probably indicative of a calibration error on your workstations.
Both of those panels are 8-bit IPS panels with great gammut, so the panels shouldn't be the issue.
I've yet to see any reasonable rate for renting one of these, unless you live in NYC near Adorama, it's almost more economical to just buy one and sell it. There's also the whole question of whether or not you need to re-calibrate after a few months.