Monitor Woes

Hello all, having some monitor issues and could use some input.

I currently have 3 Acer g236hl monitors that I picked up cheap for Eyefinity gaming.
In that area they have shined. However in the application of rendering they are all over the place.
I have one on my Mac mini and two on my PC and none of them have the same color.
The Mac is close to what I want as is to be expected but the PC is desaturating images something horrid.

Is there a way to salvage the monitors and get better more consistent color from them or should I put them on Craig’s List and just buy a new one. If the latter then what is a good monitor tech that will not break me. I’d have $300 to spend at the top end.

Thanks

Is it possible to take one of the PC monitors and hook it up to the mac to see if you have the same issue on the mac (desaturated colors). If it looks the same as it did on the PC… than you have a monitor problem… If I remember right, macs use a different gamma setting than windows… that could be playing into it as well.

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable in color calibration can help you.

Thanks Harley. I have moved them all around and I get the same results: Mac tolerable, PC intolerable.
My guess is a calibration issue but I have no idea what fixing that involves or if these cheap monitors would even benefit.

It is. Even new monitors of the same make and model will display colour and contrast differences.

Buy a hardware calibration device, such as a Spyder. It is a worthwhile investment, especially as Blender can be made aware of the monitor profile.

More information here, if you haven’t already read it:-
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Sobotka/Color_Management/Calibration_and_Profiling
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Sobotka/Color_Management

Thanks Organic. I can get a Color Munki Smile locally for about $90. Would that be sufficient?

I’m not familiar with the specification, though they all do the same job. The difference will be in the feature set. Desirable features would be ambient light reading, setting a target brightness or white point(can make a difference when matching two or more screens as the native white point will vary slightly), calibrate multiple displays and ‘studio match’ (matching screens on different computers).

The Smile (as far as I can tell) will match multiple screens but doesn’t support ambient light reading or(possibly) setting target brightness. A ColorMunki Display or Spyder Pro probably has a better feature set for the money if your budget will stretch to it. The ColorMunki Display Pro seems to be much recommended.

In some cases the actual hardware is the same(e.g the Spyder Elite and Pro), but the lower priced models are shipped with ‘crippled’ software(which cannot be upgraded), but a way around this is to not use the shipped software and instead run it on something like Argyll with dispcalGUI. You may then be able to access more of the ‘hidden’ features. http://dispcalgui.hoech.net/

An interesting alternative is the open source ColorHug. It is very affordable, though unfortunately is still linux only:-
http://www.hughski.com/

More information:-
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/Calibration/MonitorCalibrationHardware.html

This will all seem confusing and overwhelming at first, but for sure, it is worth researching. Once you have the monitors profiled and calibrated and set up in Blender, you can expect the render window to exactly match the saved render viewed in other colour managed software, such as Photoshop, Gimp, Firefox, Safari, and, of course, on other profiled and calibrated monitors.

Thanks again Organic, I have been reading the wiki pages you linked before and feel much better about the process now.

Went and dropped 90 bucks on a ColorMinki Smile yesterday and spent about 6 hours calibrating/profiling my PC monitors. What a difference 6 hours can make.

I really thought I was in need of new monitors, not only was the color off but the difference between each of the three was quite drastic.

Anyway, the software that the Smile comes with is limited at best and does not allow target white point/contrast adjustments so I installed dispcalGUI and was able to use all the deeper functions of the device.

If you are in need of color management but don’t want spend a lot then I would recommend you give the ColorMunki Smile by x-rite a shot. Just the device that is, leave the software in the box and immediately install dispcalGUI for calibration/profiling of your monitors.

BIG thanks Organic for all your input.

Glad you got it worked out Anthony… color management is a confusing and frustrating area, but definitely important in any kind of graphics.

Nice. That looks like good value for money :slight_smile: