Frank Steinmetzger <war...@gmx.de> wrote: > Hey gurus > > I may soon get me a shiny (not in the sense of glossy, mind you) new > monitor. Along with it, I’m planning on purchasing a colorimeter to > properly calibrate it. Can anyone give me a recommendation for a > device that runs well with Linux? > > It doesn’t have to be a super-pro device, but no el-cheapo either. > I’ll need it mostly for photo editing and the warm feeling of having > an above-average setup. *g* Oh and I want to improve my laptop > experience, because those things usually come with crappy screens in > the first place. So I’m looking at a price range of no more than 150€. > > Also, I’m looking for info on how to set up KDE (or the entire > system?) to use the thusly generated colour profiles. So any food for > thought? > > Thanks
If you don't wanna spent much money you can buy a used Datacolor Spyder device on ebay. The older ones (e.g. Spyder2) are really cheap, but also very slow. :-) If your monitor has a wide color gamut then you probably need a more sophisticated device however. In that case a ColorHug AFAIK probably would also not work for you. If your monitor don't have a wide gamut but have a LED backlight then some of the cheaper colorimeters are also not suitable because LEDs doesn't emit a continuous spectrum and thus can "confuse" older colorimeters like the Spyder2 AFAIK. You really should check this out because if your colorimeter doesn't work proper for your monitor the result will be worse than without calibration. :-) A good software is media-gfx/argyllcms. Some time ago I tested it with a Spyder2 and also with a X-Rite i1 Display Pro. Argyll was better then the software delivered with both colorcheckers. Nevertheless it was not possible to proper calibrate my wide color gamut monitor because it was a rarely used model (Acer AL2723W) that is not supported by the Spyder2 or i1 Display Pro. There are ways to calibrate such a unsupported wide gamut monitor with a Spyder2 or i1 Display Pro (and other colorimeters) anyhow, but then you need a calibration file for argyll made with an spectrometer especially for this kind of monitor or a calibration software from the monitor manufacturer that is adapted for the monitor model. That's the reason why I bought a new monitor (Samsung U32D970Q) some weeks ago that is able to do a hardware calibration (different colorimeters an spectrometers are supported). One advantage with hardware calibration is that you don't have to deal with icc profiles. If you work with icc profiles you often have problems with color banding/clipping and improper greyscales. This also depends on how you can adjust colors and gamma with the settings of the monitor itself. If you do all the calibration with an icc profile and the colors/gamma of your monitor are way off then the result will be probably not very good. Sorry, but my English is not good enough to explain the whole background in an understandable way. :-) -- Regards wabe
