A Calibrator: What For?
Calibrators are probes capable of measuring most of the static parameters of a monitor, such as brightness, contrast, the intensity of each color, temperature and gamma.
With suitable software, calibrators are capable of creating color profiles (.icc files) that can be used in Windows and the Mac OS as the user wishes.
Now, if you're always working at 6500K with a gamma value of 2.2, the usefulness of a calibrator is questionable. In fact, for 95% of applications, the default settings of the product are acceptable, and a simple adjustment of brightness and contrast is sufficient to achieve a suitable image quality for the majority of users. On the other hand, if you're an image-editing professional and, for example, you wish to achieve a chromatic temperature of 5000K or 7500K, it's in your interest to know if your monitor is capable of accurate display. And even if that's not the case, it's still useful to make a corrected color profile for the monitor to know for sure that you're seeing accurate colors.
In other words, without calibration, you blindly trust what's displayed on your monitor. With a calibrator you are confident of always seeing things as they should be.
In addition, it's important to understand that the characteristics of an LCD monitor function differently in different environments. The liquid crystals are more fluid when the ambient temperature rises, for example. What's more, the brightness of the back-lighting diminishes with the age of the product.
When the ambient light level increases, the user will tend to increase the brightness of the monitor. What color accuracy are we getting in that situation? Calibrators allow the adjustment to take account of the ambient light level.
Finally, calibrators are more useful for photo editing and modeling than for CAD/CAM designers. We chose two calibrators, one working with a Mac, the other with a PC: the LaCie Blue-Eye 2 and the Gretag Macbeth Eye-One Display 2 respectively.
| Price | |
|---|---|
| LaCie Blue-Eye 2 | $280 |
| Gretag Eye One Display 2 | $280 |
These products use the same platform as that used to view the photos, but two radically different software solutions. We should mention that LaCie also offers a Pro version of Blue-Eye, but this is only available on the Macintosh and we preferred multi-platform solutions for this test. At the end of the calibration, the colors displayed differed a little between the two products.
