( 34 reviews )
-
( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Aug 8 2009
If you take lots of photos and process them on your PC the the Spyder3 is an easy to use necessity for color matching. I had borrowed another unit to try and returned it. After a hard drive upgrade I lost the color profile and was missing the better color quality and subtle tones in my monitor the profile gave me. I ordered the Spyder 3 S3P100 based on the product reputation( and cost). I am very pleased with the product. It is now a must have piece of hardware! PS turn on the color profile in Firefox if that is your browser for even more viewing pleasure
-
Posted: Jul 30 2009
It is amazing the difference in the colors after calibration. The product is easy to use and install. I would recommend it to any photographer needing to calibrate a monitor.
-
Posted: Jul 28 2009
Similar to some of the reviewers that gave the product 1 star, I too have serious reddish color tint with profile generated by this calibrator. I give it two stars instead of one, because their customer service seems to act very fast, although with no help. At least they tried hard, but the product, or maybe the quality control, is the real problem. I have a long history of calibrating monitor because I am an avid amateur photographer, and care about color accuracy. Since 2004 I have been using an Eyeone Display to calibrate all my monitors. I have done at least 100 successful calibrations in the past 5 years. I initially thought about upgrade to the eye one display2, but felt that it might not provide much different result from the original version because they use the same software, and the original one is very good already if you are familiar with your monitors and know how to properly calibrate them accordingly. So I bought the Spyder3 pro thinking that I might just try something different. It is a mistake. I tried all kinds of combination of settings, the results are very consistent, but consistently bad in the same way. It creates reddish banding. If displaying a gray gradient in Photoshop, you can see reddish tint in some of the shadow, but they are not continuous, thus I call it reddish banding. A couple of reddish band followed by a couple of neutral ones then reddish again, and neutral one follow ... This happens in all the profiles (I tried a whole evening and a whole morning) I created. Emailed customer support. They got to me pretty quickly. You know what they routinely suggest, like turn off the power saving, turn off the control panel of the video card, using the preset color setting, etc. Those things are what I check every time before I make a profile. Of course they are of no help. Their conclusion seems to be that the reddish color is the characteristic of a Abobe RGB profile (my monitor is HP LP2475w which covers 100% of Abobe RGB gamut). I did not tell them the profile I generated from my 5 years old Eyeone does not do this. I am too kind sometimes. They are good guys, so why hurt the innocent ones. The Eyeone display original is not perfect either, contrary to the Spyder 3, the problem of the eyeone display is its inconsistency. You can try two calibrations with the exactly same setting within a few minutes of each other, they could look very different. However if you keep trying, you can always get one profile that is pretty decent. Overall, it is better than the spyder 3, because at least you can get a good calibration with the eye one if you try hard enough. I am not sure if the problem is related to my unit. I would suggest those who want to buy this product should at least buy it from a merchant with good return policy. You might need it :).
