Viewsonic and Apple's Calibration (SL)
 

Yesterday, I followed Apple's monitor calibrator (Sys Prefs>Displays>Color>Calibrate…) and things look a mite too crispy here...

the first thing you do is crank the contrast as high as it will go, then several screens of making the Apple disappear relative to its background, etc...

I followed the instructions as faithfully as I could, yet I'm not sure that the calibration I ended up with is correct. Some icons appear a little too intense in their color..maybe I'm simply not accustomed to this new profile.

Can anyone weigh in on the wisdom of that first step..the one where you incease Contrast to 100%, then adjust brightness so that the gray oval disappears (and then on to the next steps..) It was after I put contrast to 100% that things started looking pretty wierd, and adjusting the brightness didn't help much. The remaining steps got me back to what looks reasonable, but...I'm still not sure.

Many thanks!

a

You should check that the _other_ contrast setting is all the way to Normal - in System Preferences/Universal Access/Seeing tab

thank you..just checked and the one in Universal Access is at "Normal."


a

In the short term, try some of the test pages and test images on the web with lots of small grayscale steps and lots of small color steps. Using Apple's utility with a third party monitor I'd say that you don't have to go all the way with the contrast. Try some other settings and see how they look.

You can get much, much better results by getting a hardware calibration device. Probably the least expensive one that works is the huey pro.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/TN096ZM/A

I'd say stay away from the basic huey, the software that comes with it is just not good enough. For more dollars you can get a spyder or an eye-one.

http://www.xrite.com/product_overview.aspx?ID=789

http://spyder.datacolor.com/product-mc.php

I'll just second what mclbruce says above--I'd recommend a hardware calibrator.

Trevor

OK..there is sure a range of prices from "attractive pricing" to "whoa!"
Thank you for those recommendations and suggestions.

a