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[OM] Re: [OT] Pantone huey + First Monitor Impressions

Subject: [OM] Re: [OT] Pantone huey + First Monitor Impressions
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2007 19:50:53 -0700
Willie Wonka wrote:
> Thank you guys for the quick response and thank you Andrew for volunteering 
> to check with your friend Mark.
>   My first impressions from getting the new monitor were mixed.  It is a 
> great improvement from the 17 inch CRT I bought five years ago just because 
> had excellent specs.
>   There are two things that bug me about the new monitor:
>   I.  The vertical viewing angle isnt that great (although the horisontal is 
> superb).  I knew that when I was at the store.  It is better than most of the 
> monitors that I considered and it probably would be ok if it weren't set for 
> the line about half an inch below the top.  Just a notch lower would have 
> been perfect IMHO, but as I sez, all others were set that way.  I thought 
> that the rule of the thumb was somewhere in the upper third of the screen.
>   
So if you knew it didn't have what you wanted, why did you buy it? I 
recently acquired a new LCD to replace my CRT, which has the habit of 
dropping out the blue channel, and it was getting more frequent. 
Although I did a bit of looking at stores, I found it singularly 
uninformative. The material displayed is of questionable quality and the 
height of the displays was often above eye level.

I did a lot of reading on the web of reviews, both official and user 
reviews, confusing at first, but with more input, patterns started to 
emerge. I ended up buying a Samsung 226bw, without ever seeing one in 
person, and am quite pleased. If there is a full color image in screen 
when I walk into the room, color/contrast aren't good, but sitting at my 
desk, the image is unchanged over the range of head motion up and down 
and side to side that I can make without hurting my body. There is none 
of the sort of thing you talk about. I don't veen understand what you 
mean by "set for the line about half an inch below the top". Mine is 
clear and even all over.

It also resolves find detail better than either the Sun/Trinitron or 
Sylvania 19" monitors I've been using.

A note on sizes for those who have yet to go LCD. The diagonal 
measurement is even more misleading with 16:9 aspect ration monitors. 
The new 22" wide screen monitor is only about 1/2" larger in the 
vertical dimension than the 4:3, 19" CRTs. I had worked this out 
beforehand, but I imagine some folks have bought the same nominal size 
in a wide-screen as their old CRT, only to find the images smaller.
>   II.  I don't know how I am going to adjust the whites...
>   In a mean time I have managed to confuse myself when it comes to monitor 
> calibration.  When you buy a sensor, any sensor...they measure light relative 
> to what?  Here is where the source of confusion is:
>   I know that people would see lightness and saturation differently in 
> pictures.  I realized that recently, when for the nth time I looked at some 
> landscape I wanted to take a picture of with each of my eyes individually.  
> My right eye sees little darker and the colors are slightly more saturated.  
> Not by much, just enough to notice.  So, I was thinking that if there is a 
> noticeable difference between the eyes I use, there must be difference 
> between how other people see and it might be more pronounced...
>   
And yet, you can't see through anyone else's eyes, and will never have 
any idea what they actually visualize in their heads. For all I know, if 
I were to somehow able to have a direct brain to brain feed, I would 
find that you see in color negative relative to what I see. But all that 
doesn't matter, as we all know what is "normal" for use for all natural 
scenes. We have in effect, "calibrated" our vision systems by viewing 
countless "frames".

So what calibration works on is consistency. Using hardware measuring 
systems, they measure reproduction of standardized color sources and 
record the differences from a virtual ideal reproducer. These 
differences may then be used to adjust the signal to the reproducer so 
its output comes close to the correct colors. Standards have been 
implemented for all aspects of color capture and reproduction.

In a fully color managed system, the image captured by 
film/scanner/sensor is adjusted using the icc profile for that/those 
devices in the process of saving the master file. When that image is 
viewed on a calibrated monitor, the image is again, temporarily, 
adjusted in the process of display. so although the editor/whatever is 
working with the "pure" file, the display system is adjusting the colors 
going to the display to correct for inaccuracies of the monitor.

Printing used the same idea as viewing on a monitor, adjusting color on 
the way to the print mechanism to correct for its measured inaccuracies. 
So images of a particular thing created with different tools of capture 
be the same objective colors on different screens and in prints from 
different printers.

And it doesn't matter what any particular person "really" sees, as the 
image will hold the same relationship to the original for them as for 
anyone else, even though what they"see", were it possible to know 
outside their mind, may or may not be quite different from what you 
"see". Remember, research shows clearly that the virtual images we "see" 
are not very closely related to the "RAW" capture of the sensors in our eyes
>   Based on that observation, I came to the conclusion, that no matter what 
> tool I use, at the end my pictures will look too dull to some or 
> oversaturated to others.  Am I missing sompin'?
>   
I hope I've explained above. Calibration means only that we who are 
calibrated are all looking at the same measured colors, but that's quite 
a lot, compared to the chaos elsewhere.

Most people aren't aware of such differences between their eyes as you 
notice. In fact, I find it odd, as I would assume the visual cortex 
would correct for that. I have a slightly different situation. My left 
eye has 20/20 vision when corrected, while the right is 20/10. when the 
right eye is closed or obstructed, I occasionally wonder if the slightly 
fuzzy (to me) world I then see is what most of the population is seeing 
all the time. But it is normal to them.
>   Boris
>   P.S.  I went and used the Adobe calibration tool...figured out that at 
> least I should make my eyes happy...:)
>   
I went through that with the Adobe and other tools for color calibration 
using the screen and my eyes. I thought it was pretty good - until I got 
a real calibration system - oops!

So all that's very well, but then it comes up against a couple of things 
beyond its control. One is the relative nature of human senses. In the 
case of vision, that means that the relative brightness of surroundings 
affects the apparent brightness of the image, be it on screen or print. 
So, to calibrate a screen, one must input something about the intensity 
of the light in which it will be viewed. And that's one place where the 
Huey is supposed to come in, adjusting screen brightness as room 
brightness changes. That's of no interest to me, as the moderate 
brightness of my intentional computer cave never varies except when the 
light burns out.

At least with a screen, it provides its own light. Prints are dependent 
on the nature and intensity of the light under which they are viewed, 
both because of our vesion system and because hey don't always reflect 
light the same. A lot of professionals who depend on color accuracy only 
view prints, and sometimes screens, in special lighting.

My recommendation, based on a fair amount of research, is to skip the 
Huey and get a real color calibration system. I use a Monaco Optix 
sensor with their software in a package called Monaco Optix XR Pro. 
There are other systems, some of which use the same sensor with 
different software, and I thingk they are probably all pretty good. The 
trick is having a sensor that reads a series of colors and brightnesses 
directly on the screen. One of he problems with the Adobe and other 
systems that rely on your eyes is that they only calibrate color, even 
if you et them right, at one brightness, but screens aren't necessarily 
linear in color balance with brightness.

When I got the Samsung, I calibrated it next to the Sylvania. while 
there s a slightly different quality to the images, the colors sure look 
the same to me, at least when the CRT is behaving.

Moose

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