Screen Calibration

Has anybody here ever calibrated their monitor properly? What sort of screen, and what sort of a difference did it make for you?

Scored a Spyder5Express during Black Friday and I've just spent the past few days learning how to use it with DisplayCal and HCFR.

Screen in question is a 6-7yo 50" Changhong plasma which was a hand-me-down from my parents when i moved out.

Honestly I couldn't believe the difference a proper calibration made - my screen was way too bright and red. Everything just seems natural now.

Excuse the blog post but it's a subject I never see here and I'm pretty chuffed atm

i try to stay away from it now adays because screen tech is just a money-sink rabbithole that you really don't want to pursue.

the more i read about screen tech the more problems i would notice in my monitors that never went away, or you end up trading one "problem" for another problem win buying a new one.

just buy a good dell monitor and call it a day

Overall it's fine if the display has some form of hardware correction.

If you have to get into correcting it in LUT then you're fucked for compatibility.

Overall it's worth it, but many monitors now have a decent delta.

>Spending 100 bucks to have someone tell you your monitor configuring is shit

Why dont you sit your ass down and actually do your shit?

>I'm pretty chuffed

You should probably see a doctor for that.

Yeah this

I was really happy with my new HRD10 4k TV and a month later I came across some info and found it it's only 8bit + FRC. Apparently it hardly makes a difference but it's annoying me constantly now that I know

>have high end NEC professional graphics display with proper built-in calibration support
>haven't bothered to buy the calibration kit because it looks fine to me as is

I swear I'm not one of those people who just thinks any and every display looks fine, though. I'm sure my NEC isn't perfect without calibration, but it must be way closer than most are out of the box.

I used it once. It's in a box gathering dust. I will set some time one day to recalibrate my cheapo monitor again. I'm too lazy to check if it needs to recalibrate.

ah shit forgot to read the rest of your post.
>What sort of screen, and what sort of a difference did it make for you?
LG Ultrawide monitor 2160x1080. It made a difference. Because I'm very picky. As a headphone enthusaist I'm picky with audio. I'm picky with visuals. For a pleb. You don't need this snakeoil Spyder calibrator.

I make my screen super orange and dark with flux, so I obviously don't care about colors being how they're supposed to be. I just want it to be easy on my eyes.

>For a pleb. You don't need this snakeoil Spyder calibrator.
By that I meant. If it's a want or a need. I needed to calibrate badly. I'm picky. It's not snakeoil but you gotta realize there's people out there with TN panel monitors and they gotta prioritise their money first on getting a okay IPS monitor.

This
With tech, ignorance is bliss to a degree.

I have a spyder4 which I use to calibrate all my devices with.

One downside is once you start calibrating you realize how shit display technology are.

IPS
>often fucked up white points
>calibrating to 6400k srgb fucks up the contrast
>low contest makes everything lifeless and washed out

AMOLED
>PERFECT for calibration, no matter how fucked up the factory calibration is. After a calibration you will always get a perfect display.
>BURN
>IN

>Honestly I couldn't believe the difference a proper calibration made
I've never had one of my screens calibrated but I had my laptop beside my dads screen, which was. We were looking at pictures of some real estate and the difference was immense. I've since compared my laptop to my phone, a galaxy s6. The phone is impressively accurate.

I've played fallout shelter on both my laptop and my phone. On my laptop the loading screen looks like it's faded with and yellowed time, something I've always assumed was the intention because fallout. Comparing it to the phone, it's quite clear that that is not the case.

CRT?

>AMOLED
>Burn in
How old is your AMOLED screen? How, exactly, have you achieved burn in? I've had two AMOLED phones that are getting a bit long in the tooth now, neither have had an easy life. Both screens are still burn in free, even the android despite the task bar. Yes, I've checked with an app.

>Bought spyderpro on amazon
>calibrate monitors
>send it back the next day and get a refund

Small
Makes the room hot

Max out the brightness and display a gray background. You'll definitely see it. The darker the gray the more visible. Not too dark though.

That's another flaw for amoled actually. All manufacture/defects are visible on gray.

My 2016 MacBook Pro 15" does not need to be calibrated.

I usually just use the calibration results they have for my monitor on TFTCentral.

>get banned from amazon
>ruined when amazon becomes omnipresent in the future

Scamazon is a bad meme

kek

I would, but I don't have a colorimeter and color accuracy isn't important enough for me to spend the money.

yeah, pretty soon you'll need an account to shop at the grocery store

cap this

Imagine shoving your pinky finger down your urethra to open it up good, then laying one of those river fish that swim up your pee hole and embed themselves in it in your now gaping sperm chute. Then imagine having a doctor sew up your penis hole where only the little fishs tailfin is sticking out, close it up nice and tight now. Now let that shit heal for a few weeks, all the while drinking plenty of algae juice to keep your little pee pee partner alive on your algae enfused urine. Now the day has come that you and dickhole Derrick must part ways. Yeah, you decided to name him Derrik. You get yourself a massive errection, and shove your flaired chance you got from bad dragon all the way up your ass. You cum so hard that Derrik is flung from your throbbing dick hard enough to tear you a new vagina inside your dick. Blood and salty cum buring the slit carved in your freshly opened dick, as you look over a Derrick's splattered remains on the wall.

This is the pain one must suffer if one wants to calibrate a television and a computer monitor so they look the same.

big difference, even on my 900$ professional Dell monitor.

use i1 Display pro

Remember kids, you need a calibrated display to post frog pictures on a Nepalese cave painting board.

My Thinkpad has a calibrator built in, but it's just a gimmick since the display isn't even IPS

I have a two monitor setup with the same exact model, bought in person off the same pallet and the colors are so completely out of whack between the two monitors.

I'd say it bothers me 3 out of 10

Link?

Can it really be that annoying? I realise my TV looked like shit before, but I can't see it being so bad that I'd need to buy another. Unless I were to get OLED for dem blacks of course.

They come pretty good out of the box but I did my calibration on a TV. I feel they have bigger variances.

How so? ReShade seems like it can do the job properly. Haven't got it working properly in Kodi yet though. Just tuning the TV brightness/contrast/hi+lo color made a major difference for me.

I did, senpai. Read the post. I calibrated it myself.

Kek, I think you mean "Chafed"

When the time comes to buy a new TV, this worries me.

Was it used? May already have been calibrated.

Funny you say that as I have a Dayton calibration mic that I bought in the same sale to calibrate my audio setup too. I calibrated it by eye not long ago and the Spyder still made a big difference.

So do I, but only on my PC monitors and only at night. Still means brightness and contrast are right though.

I don't think burn in is as big a problem with TVs though. You're never displaying a static picture. I'm of course assuming that the larger OLED TVs are using AMOLED.

I did this too after calibrating the TV. There was literally no banding at all. Pretty impressive that they get it so right.

You still need to calibrate every so often senpai. You could make back the purchase price by renting it out though. It's what I plan to do, just go over to mates places and do it in return for beer. It'll pay itself back...in beer.

I think you'll find it does

>What is variance

This has pasta potential. Is it really that hard with a colorometer though?

Does that have a spectrometer as well?

I must calibrate my Thinkpad then

What model?

You are a more patient man then me then.

>What model?
W520
Also change your posting style

jesus christ

>replying to 19 posts in one post
Please stop.

Pretty cool. X220 doesn't have it unfortunately.

I'll have to figure out how to switch profiles easily, as with my Thinkpad I use a 27" Catleap at home, and 2x Dell U24xx at work (can't remember off of the top of my head)

Posted the thread as I was waiting in line to get Santa photos with my kid and we were next up, only just getting back on now lol.

I posted like that as it was such a long post. Looks fine on desktop but probably looks like a clusterfuck on a mobile

holy fucking autism, batman

>Was it used? May already have been calibrated.
Well I got it at a pawn shop without a box or anything but I don't think it was actually used. I didn't realize there was an hours counter until I used it for a while, but when I did check the counter was close to what I'd estimated I'd put on it, so it had few if any hours on it when I got it.

I don't remember what the settings were like exactly but I'm pretty sure I checked and there either wasn't a calibrated profile or it just matched the uncalibrated sRGB profile exactly meaning it wasn't actually calibrated.

Sounds pretty good, what display and how much?

>Has anybody here ever calibrated their monitor properly?
Yeah
>What sort of screen
All of them, from my dumpster diving CRT's to the shit screens on my chinkpads and obviously my TV's
>and what sort of a difference did it make for you?
Depends on the screen, some of my old CRT's had developed a massive drift to green, instead of opening them up and fucking with the electronics calibration fixed them
It made the screen on my T420 usable fixing the fucked up gamma and the over 9000K color temp, it also fixed the 2.7 gamma of my X60 to pretty close to BT1886
On my MBA and a decent CCFL LCD monitors the difference hasn't been so massive, most of them were already pretty close to reference, it's still nice that all my screens are consistent
On my TV's the results have been hit and miss, most of them are oldish plasmas, old LCD's or new LCD's, the old LCD's lack enough controls, the plasma's have fucking ABL and sometimes lack controls, the new LCD's have ABL/DynamicContrast that acts on semi random ways, I haven't had time to dive in their service menus though, I kind of consider it a waste of time to do that, I haven't made a proper 3DLUT on them but I guess it could fix them perfectly
i1D3 here, I bought it a two years ago on a sale that left it at almost the same price as a Colormunky Display
There's people on AVSFormus who will lend you a one for free
>Haven't got it working properly in Kodi yet though
Kodi v17 is getting built in 3DLUT support senpai, still no ewa scalers or debanding though
>Does that have a spectrometer as well?
It's just a colorimeter, a nice one though

>Is it really that hard with a colorometer though?
It took me less than 30 mins to get the monitor calibrated perfectly with a colorometer. I adjust the tv the same way, and they look very obviously different. Sacrifice some calibration perfection of the monitor to make them look closer, try calibrating the tv again. They still look very different. Rinse and repeat 2 hours a day over the next week (not even exaggerating). They still arent exacly the same, but close enough to not bother with it anymore.

>Has anybody here ever calibrated their monitor properly?
Yes, using i1 Display Pro and ArgyllCMS

>What sort of screen, and what sort of a difference did it make for you?
I've only owned wide-gamut IPS displays for years. Difference depends on the display. My Dell display was basically uncalibrated out of te box, so it was a night-and-day difference.

My LG display on the other hand was calibrated to a naive pure-power 2.2 gamma, fairly well too. That said, I don't run my displays at 2.2 gamma, I calibrate them to BT.1886 instead. So after doing this, it also looks quite a bit different.

>Honestly I couldn't believe the difference a proper calibration made - my screen was way too bright and red. Everything just seems natural now.
What was even more amazing to me was when you have multiple displays - instead of every display looking very different they all just match perfectly.

>the more i read about screen tech the more problems i would notice in my monitors that never went away
This is true for video/audio artifacts in general. Once you start seeing something like judder, kerning, ringing, blocking etc. you're never able to un-see that thing again.

If you want to live a happy life in blissfull ignorance, don't read up on anything related to video processing or video technology. (Ditto for audio)

If you crave knowledge enough to trade in life satisfaction, then by all means start hitting the tech communities and learning about how terrible everything is once you open your eyes.

I use my TV as my computer monitor so there were plenty of resources online that had the calibrated settings listed. Feelsgoodman, perfect picture quality. I don't have a standalone monitor, only laptops, and those are not calibrated.

>Ditto for audio
Audio is even worse since snake oil is the norm
You will start imagining artifacts unless you're quite level headed

LCD2090UXi, paid $120 for it.

I was really looking for a good CRT but I had already been searching for years at that point with no luck, and the 2090 was still a nice upgrade from my 17" TN display.

>If you have to get into correcting it in LUT then you're fucked for compatibility.
Nonsense, you can just load the calibration in your GPU's display LUTs on any platform. Works just fine out of the box, and it's not like any display device has easily accessible LUTs anyway. (You always have to use shitty proprietary software that does a terrible job of calibrating)

>just buy a good dell monitor and call it a day
My experience with dell ultrasharps were absolutely god-awful. Most of them didn't even remotely hit D65 out of the box, let alone any gamma curve resembling a recognized standard. But I haven't read up on recent dell monitors so maybe they stepped up their game?

Virtually all 10-bit panels are 8-bit+FRC. That's completely normal, and nothing to really worry about unless you're doing medical imaging and need to identify 2-pixel large tumors.

8bit+FRC is visually transparent.

>I calibrated it by eye not long ago and the Spyder still made a big difference.
The expert consensus is that calibration by eye is absolutely and utterly impossible unless you have a very well-trained eye and a lot of experience calibrating monitors.

>Does that have a spectrometer as well?
No, the i1 Display Pro is just a colorimeter. X-Rite's product names are absolute garbage

The spectrometer is the “i1 Pro”, not the “i1 Display Pro”. Alternatively, there's also the “ColorMunki Photo”, which is a cheaper spectrometer. (Not to be confused with the “ColorMunki Display”, which is a slower i1 Display Pro rebrand)

Have you tried calibrating the TV using the colorimeter?

useless junk unless you do things that eventually end up as hardcopy.

this, try it when you have a dell IPS and an old ass toshiba TN TV, I just settled on not giving a fuck

>Kodi v17 is getting built in 3DLUT support senpai, still no ewa scalers or debanding though
mpv also has working ICC profile support, probably the best implementation of the lot (LittleCMS and spec-conforming BT.1886).

>Screen in question is a 6-7yo 50" Changhong plasma which was a hand-me-down from my parents when i moved out.
Something you need to keep in mind user is that colorimeters need to be tuned to match the light spectrum of the display, which for LCD displays basically means the backlight technology (e.g. standard CCFL, wide CCFL, W-LED, GB-r LED, RGB LED and so on)

Especially if you're calibrating something like CRTs, projectors or plasma displays you need to make sure your calibration software is applying the right set of correction curves. If you're using ArgyllCMS you want to be looking at this setting basically. (The values are exported by the device, so it will look different for you)

DisplayCal has a similar setting somewhere, I'm sure. (GUIs are for plebs anyway)

tl;dr make sure you're setting the correction curves to plasma mode when calibrating a plasma TV. Otherwise your calibration will be wrong!

Spyder4 and above should support these settings. Spyder3 still uses locked/fixed sensitivity curves, tuned only for W-LED / sRGB phosphors and nothing else. You can still work around it with custom correction matrices but they're not provided by the device, so you have to hunt down the internet for sketchy curves.

>Kodi v17 is getting built in 3DLUT support senpai, still no ewa scalers or debanding though

I've seen, but currently it only supports it in the Linux beta version.

My HTPC is running Windows so I can run games on it. A real pain in the ass but a necessary evil considering I have to use Powerline network to my office, which doesn't have a gaymen PC at the moment.

I would think that if you have them perfectly calibrated they would match?

Watch the trench scene in Finding Nemo. Look at the terrible banding around the angler fishes light. Calibrate, then look again. Wow, no banding! Obviously useless though.

Yeah I learned the hard way. Let it calibrate overnight, then realised that it was a plasma and not a LCD so had to redo it. Looks great now though.

user...why would I calibrate one with a meter, and not the other? Of course I used the colorometer to calibrate the tv. Especially since the tvs visual adjustments were pure garbage. Something akin to:
>vibrant
>default
>sports
>movie

>Let it calibrate overnight
Oh man, I remember when I was still using a spyder 3. That shit took 10 hours for a high-grade calibrationg

Meanwhile with the i1 Display Pro it just flies through the calibration at such absurd speeds, it's not even funny. It's at least 10x faster per measurement, if not more. I can do a fresh calibration from scratch in 20-30 minutes top.

It sounded like you were trying to get the display to match by hand, rather than via software

i1 display pro + displaycal

Every monitor needs calibration. Every one.

Some Eizo monitors come with a calibrator built in to the bottom bezel in order to calibrate it, so you don't need to buy an external calibrator.

I bought a cheap calibrator because I was sure mine was off and determined to improve it at the very least. It does look a lot better now, I wouldn't call it perfect but it is much closer than it was.

>Every monitor needs calibration. Every one.
If only because most of the pre-calibrated monitors end up calibrating to the wrong standards

Calibration settings differ from panel to panel and the room you have it set up in. You can't just use calibrations you find online. It won't be accurate for you.

Another thing to worry about re: calibrating your devices is that you want to give your device plenty of time to warm up.

CCFL-based devices start out too dark and gradually get brighter, while LED-based devices start out too bright and gradually get darker.

(That said, some very expensive monitors like the Eizo ColorEdge series embed active correction logic to counteract the settling curve as much as possible, allowing them to be color-accurate almost from the first minute onwards)

>Another thing to worry about re: calibrating your devices is that you want to give your device plenty of time to warm up.
This goes for both the display and the colorimeter. Let it sit on top of the display and heat up.

what are the best calibration targets for watching media on an lcd?

*Not a nerd, just a almost 40 year old graphic designer here passing through on clover to get jack materials on gif.

Screen calibrators were only relvant when if you have to worry about print media and CRT monitors. Otherwise sell it on eBay to suckers for $$.

Pick a brightness your eyes are comfortable with at night then do a calibration based on that. Backlit panels lose more accuracy with lower brightness.

i've normally aimed for d65, 120cd/m2 and 2.2 gamma, would i get less accuracy going to 100cd/m2?

If only because everyone has different ambient lighting environments.

>Putting your comment inline with the post link

please go away

whenever i calibrate both my monitors one is always more yellow in the whites, is there a way in displaycal to calibrate one to match the other rather than aim for a target gamma?

It's just a placebo effect for the most part.

You lose contrast with lower brightness.

But if you profile for daytime brightness to preserve contrast and at night you reduce to brightness to say 100cmd2 the accuracy might go from 99% to 92%

But if you profile for night your contrast will be lower but in the morning you can increase the brightness and it'll only decrease from 99% to 96%

It ultimately depends on your display characteristics. Some displays lose a lot of contrast at different brightness and some not so much.

This is also why two 100% professionally calibrated panels can look vastly different. Due to manufacturing variances the white point could be different and the only way to calibrate something is to reduce the rgb channels, and by doing so you reduce the contrast.

Two perfectly calibrated displays can both be 100% accurate at the same time AND look different. It has something to do with the human biology and unfortunately that's out of my scope of knowledge.

>Two perfectly calibrated displays can both be 100% accurate at the same time AND look different. It has something to do with the human biology and unfortunately that's out of my scope of knowledge.
It's metameric failure, which is something still being researched and a major problem on really wide colorspaces like DCI-P3
iirc it has to do with the spectral response of their illuminants/light sources
Though in the case of most displays it's probably using the colorimeter with inadequate correction matrix/curves, which can be fixed by generating the correction files with a spectro

I highly recommend calibrating to BT.1886 if you're going to watch media. That's basically the de-facto standard for TVs etc., and is also what stuff like Blu-rays and videos are expected to be watched on.

For sole web usage sRGB might be more appropriate, but I personally feel BT.1886 is a better calibration target especially for IPS simply because the near-black response is much better.

At the end of the day, if colors are critical, you'll want to be using ICC-aware software either way (e.g. mpv, krita and firefox)

does firefox automatically detect the icc profile? i have mpv configured to use my generated 3dlut

Ambient lighting is a meme. A typical display is large enough and dominant enough to the point where your ambient brightness conditions don't impact the perceived gamma at all. If you can find me a reliable citation of a study where ambient lighting conditions were found to have a non-negligible effect on image perception on anything other than a tiny CRT or laptop, I'd love to hear about it.

Guaranteed you've never seen a calibration pre/post comparison

Most displays don't even remotely hit the white point, so everything ends up yellow or blue (underwater laptop screens is a common thing). You probably just don't realize it because you've never really paid attention, like most people who are ignorant about video artifacts until they become aware of them.

I just calibrate the monitor alone, I don't mess with ICC profiles since all I do is play vidya.

I use:

Colormunki Display
DisplayCAL
Asus PG279Q

Out of the box, the picture is too bright and the color temperature is too cold, calibration makes it look natural which is also easier on my eyes subjectively speaking. The display has been calibrated to:

6500K white point
120 cd/m2 brightness
2.2 Gamma

>does firefox automatically detect the icc profile?
I'm.. not entirely sure. There's a setting to set the ICC profile path, but it may also detect it at runtime (although iirc it didn't update the ICC profile if you moved the window between displays). You need to enable color management and ICCv4 support though, both are disabled out of the box.

(search for `color_management` in about:config)

>i have mpv configured to use my generated 3dlut
Surely you mean the ICC profile, right?

well the 3dlut is generated as an icc file

>I highly recommend calibrating to BT.1886 if you're going to watch media
>For sole web usage sRGB might be more appropriate
I used to do this, but I found that that BT.1886 is a better idea since it's the first EOTF being widely adopted, it's easier to calibrate to it, doesn't crush blacks and it's close to other response curves
>does firefox automatically detect the icc profile?
Yes, unless you're on a multi monitor setup in which case it can only use the profile of the first display
You need to enable a few things in about:config though, like ICCv4 support, using the profile for CSS elements and specially assuming sRGB for untagged images
Chromium also auto detects ICC profiles in Windows and most GNU/Linux distros, I don't know the specifics of it though
>I just calibrate the monitor alone
tbqh this is enough on most modern monitors, unless it has a wide colorspace
Most modern monitors are linear enough to not need a 3DLUT/ICC profile

Right, but that's just the B2A table - not the entire end-to-end transform (which is what the term “3DLUT” usually refers to in video players like Kodi, MPDN, madVR etc.) which is why I was unsure.

Regardless, mpv doesn't let you generate your own 3DLUT anyway so it's not like you could have done it differently unless you used some stupid --vf

i just generated it with displaycal

>I used to do this, but I found that that BT.1886 is a better idea since it's the first EOTF being widely adopted, it's easier to calibrate to it, doesn't crush blacks and it's close to other response curves
Yeah basically this. BT.1886 is really well-behaved near blacks for low-contrast TFTs like IPS panels. It was literally designed for LCD displays. sRGB is designed for CRTs, and it shows.

Despite sRGB's flat section, and especially for pure power curves like gamma 2.2, you're going to get severe black crush from trying to calibrate to that target because the slope approaches zero.

sRGB is good for storing content, and that's what it's doing today, but it's not so good for displays. BT.1886 is a recommendation specifically designed for display calibration, and I believe EBU etc. also endorse it.

>tbqh this is enough on most modern monitors, unless it has a wide colorspace
This; the ICC profile is there for gamut/gamma adaptation - not calibration post-corrections. It's only really needed if the calibration curve doesn't match the content type or colorspace.

Yep, that's the normal way of doing things. DisplayCal measures the B2A response and dumps it into a profile, either as a LUT or a curves+matrix shaper.

mpv then loads these and combines it with its own A2B profile (internally generated based on the content parameters) to form the end-to-end response, which it renders to a 3DLUT and uploads to the GPU for realtime application.

get out autismo

Kill yourself.

i have an old i1 display 2 but trying to calibrate my monitor with it just results in it being tinted red. is there any way to fix this?

i1 Display 2's had shitty plastic filter that degrade seriously with time, the only way to fix it it's to get a new colorimeter or generate correction files for it with a spectro

Had my 50ST60 calibrated. Didn't notice a difference, guess the cookie-cut AVforums settings were good enough for my panel.

But really, calibrate it how you want it. 99.999cuck sure that nobody on Sup Forums actually does any work that specifically requires a monitor to be within a standard.

That probably means your display was way too blue previously.

I recommend switching on the calibration overnight, i.e. enable it when you go to sleep. When you wake up the next morning, it will look normal.

>don't impact the perceived gamma at all.
It isn't the gamma that is the issue, it is how the ambient light affects the colors.

>It isn't the gamma that is the issue, it is how the ambient light affects the colors.
the colors are a function of the gamma.... and that effect has no relevance on the scale of a display. It's true for stuff like small squares you display *on* the monitor, but the monitor itself covers such a large area of your eye that it itself is already the “ambient” as far as colors on the monitor are concerned

Like I said, the whole ambient-dependent gamma drop stuff is a film industry gimmick

And now I feel a lot better again re. the 10bit stuff. Thanks user

Actually, you should calibrate your monitor against your printer because the printer is far less adjustable.

>Max out the brightness and display a gray background.
I have, there are none. That's what I meant by "Yes, I've checked with an app"

Also, blue works much better than grey. I don't believe you own an AMOLED, you're just regurgitating the same crap you've read on Sup Forums.

looks like an expensive gimmick to make a quick buck off of gaymers and other various PC nuts