Wire ~ via colorsync-users wrote:
Why the word of caution? Is there a mismatch between low-cost colorimeters and current display tech?
Because the story that keeps being told (and the one that I was responding to) is that Colorimeters have better sensitivity than Spectrometers. And it isn't true with the sorts of Colorimeters that most people own.
There's an aspect of this stuff which for graphics customers (users) borders on the absurd. What users want are displays with well-defined characteristics and performance. But for some reason, this isn't practical, like CRT TVs use physics and circuits that drift and the whole analog thing is super smooshy from a thermodynamic POV.
They never will have well-defined characteristics when price is the bottom line.
So what the user must discover he needs is to specifically measure and characterize his display using colorimeter tech!.But this also isn't practical, for other reasons, such as the colorimeters themselves are smooshy.
Some less so than others.
So what is it about today's displays that makes them so variant that speed is required to calibrate? Sure time is money for some people, like say professional calibrators. But if you were in this business, why would you want reliable displays? They'll put you out of business!
Many TV's change their responses quite markedly with time, due to various power saving and display saving technologies. Plasma was bad, OLED is even worse in this respect. Some people like to characterize their display with full grids too - i.e. 5000 measurements or more. (TV calibrators can be kind of crazy in that regard.)
If you are just a plain user, is a commodities colorimeter like the new i1d3 a sufficiently good instrument to deal with typical quality displays?
Mostly. But it still lacks the low end sensitivity to usefully measure an OLED black.
Why can't the industry just make a reliable display and leave the colorimeter stuff up to the engineers that design these things?
See above. Mass production of a consistent product makes it not the lowest possible cost. And low cost is what the majority of customers most value. Features such as wide gamut and HDR have become a thing, meaning that there is more variations in this aspect than there ever was before. The other thing is that each model is different, and you can't rely on the manufacturer to characterize it correctly. (They can't even code a legal EDID most of the time!)
I'm not really complaining. But the topic often feels a bit circular.
Only because people want the impossible. Graeme Gill.