Guide: Do our calibration profiles work for all monitors?

We give you the profiles for most screens! Great, you say. But will they work with all operating systems (Windows XP, Vista, Mac...) or different graphic cards?

Vincent Alzieu
Published: January 14, 2008

The procedure

The screens were initially tested on a PC with 32 bit Vista Premium and a NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX graphic card. Logically, those who install these profiles on a similar machine should have the best results if your monitor is the same version as ours.

However, will the correction be as efficient in XP, with an ATI card, or a laptop with an Intel chipset or even Leopard? In VGA as in DVI? This is what we tried by connecting two screens (an LCD with rather good presettings in DVI then in VGA, as well as another with more mediocre settings) successively on each configuration by measuring color fidelity before and after the installation of the profile.

We are now offering a new and exclusive service that has been much awaited by many users: free downloads of calibration profiles for popular LCD monitors. The promise, or rather our hope, is that by simply copying a file your monitor will have almost ideal color fidelity. Just so we are clear, the idea is to significantly improve your display and not to allow graphic artists to get away with not investing in a calibration solution. Maybe in the beginning colors will appear very true; however, with time this will progressively change for the worse. Ideally, you could do your very own calibration but either way, here is hopefully a good taste of what a hardware based process with a sensor can do for you.

Color fidelity on a scale from 0 (perfect) to 10 (horrible)

This much sought after color fidelity was measured with a sensor, the LaCie, le Blue Eye Pro, which determines the difference between colors we ask the graphic card to display and those actually on the screen. The larger the difference (average dE), the less colors are true. In the below table are some examples based on more popular monitors. The 2032BW is the screen with the poorest color fidelity this year, the 10 20 35W was very popular (despite mediocre presettings), the 2232BW exists in two versions, and the ViewSonic is amazingly good for a general public product. Finally, under the heading calibrated, we give you the standard result after a screen has gone through hardware calibration.

The 2032BW’s 7.9 represents bluish rendering in photos except in white which is very reddish. The 4.4 of the 2232BW C translates into a similar defect but is not as strong. The 2232BW S is the first one on the list that we could say has good color fidelity; however between it and a calibrated screen we can see there is some room for improvement. As for the ViewSonic, it’s exceptional and the best we obtained in 2007.

We shouldn’t have to settle for approximate colors and everyone should have access to a nice display of photos, movies and the web. So is our solution miraculous? Here is the answer in tests of different configurations.