In praise of measurement
I just picked up an 'I1', otherwise known as an 'eye-one display 2'; a monitor calibrator. The new box has dual video cards (dual dual video cards, but that's another story), and I wanted, for the first time in my short life, to run a dual-monitor system (actually, a triple monitor system, but I didn't have the physical desktop (as opposed to virtual desktop) real estate to handle the overwhelming power of three monitors). Anyhow. I wanted these monitors to loook as close to each other as possible - I know I'm picky, but seriously divergent colour profiles on adjacent monitors would drive me nuts. That said, never having used one before, I figured I needed a tool to calibrate the monitors (tolerances being what they are, I expected them to be off by a noticable degree, if they weren't butt-ugly to begin with).
Despite having done my Internet research, I must say there's nothing like knowing someone who works every day in the area you're interested in. Sauntering down to the local high-end video / camera store (where they have _selection_, which means you have a _choice_), my friend picked out the I1, after the requesite disparagement of lesser products.
Getting down to it, I realize now that default colour profiles in Windows are Totally Bogus Shit. The calibrator not only made the monitors pretty damn close (being LCDs, you're always going to get some lame colour cast depending on the angle you're viewing it from), but made the colours just unbelievable. Viewing high quality images was like looking at back-lit photographs - I didn't know a images on a monitor could look this good. On the other hand, low quality images (such as you're likely to find on a web site) all of a sudden looked like a whole lot of ass, and I realized why the default colour profile is what it is - to cover up the blind butchering of colour space in most images. Fortunately, I looked at some really good images first, or I would have spent a day cursing the painfully obvious banding in the gradient filled backgrounds of the low-rent web sites I frequent.
Short story - get one of these things if you spend any time at your computer at all - no moving parts, so it should last essentailly forever. The brief moments of beauty and visual glory you'll experience will far outweigh the ass-tastic other 98% of the images you'll see. Oh, and choose the 'advanced' configuration mode - even better results.
M.
Despite having done my Internet research, I must say there's nothing like knowing someone who works every day in the area you're interested in. Sauntering down to the local high-end video / camera store (where they have _selection_, which means you have a _choice_), my friend picked out the I1, after the requesite disparagement of lesser products.
Getting down to it, I realize now that default colour profiles in Windows are Totally Bogus Shit. The calibrator not only made the monitors pretty damn close (being LCDs, you're always going to get some lame colour cast depending on the angle you're viewing it from), but made the colours just unbelievable. Viewing high quality images was like looking at back-lit photographs - I didn't know a images on a monitor could look this good. On the other hand, low quality images (such as you're likely to find on a web site) all of a sudden looked like a whole lot of ass, and I realized why the default colour profile is what it is - to cover up the blind butchering of colour space in most images. Fortunately, I looked at some really good images first, or I would have spent a day cursing the painfully obvious banding in the gradient filled backgrounds of the low-rent web sites I frequent.
Short story - get one of these things if you spend any time at your computer at all - no moving parts, so it should last essentailly forever. The brief moments of beauty and visual glory you'll experience will far outweigh the ass-tastic other 98% of the images you'll see. Oh, and choose the 'advanced' configuration mode - even better results.
M.