Eyeone 2 - really inconsistent results

[Mark Guertin]

hi folks

While I'm not a total newbie  I am very new to fighting with calibration hardware and thought this might be the best place to post this Q.  First the info on my setup.  

I'm using a pair of 23" Cinema displays on an older Dual G5 and running the latest updates with Leopard (10.5.1 + a couple security updates), both displays driven by the same card (ATI Radeon X800 XT).  I'm also using the latest updates from Xrite for the Eye-one Match (3.6.2).

I'm getting very inconsistent results across the 2 monitors.  I've tried doing both screens to the native settings as recommended by Jeff in the Camera to Print video, and I've also tried setting both monitors to D65/2.2, luminance anywhere from 120 to 140 (have done this quite a few times now with various combinations).

Not only are the results not consistent from one monitor to the other, they look terrible compared to the "by eye" calibrations I was using that I did with the OS provided tools (which yielded me pretty decent results, the prints looked like my screens) ...

Am I doing something wrong?  Is there a known problem with the eye-one match software with Leopard?  Do I have a bum eye-one (it just arrived BNIB from Vistek today)?

It's so bad right now that I drag my lightroom window from screen to screen and you can see radical differences when it changes to the local monitor setup .. and neither monitor looks good, they both seem very "cold" (read blue) atm, but using the native settings (as opposed to forcing D65/2.2) one was cold, other was warm (in the overall color temp scheme of things).

Help!

[Mark Guertin]

After some more tinkering I'm wondering something ... it seems like the native gamma and white-point in these 2 monitors may be different at the hardware level.  They were purchased at the same time, but are from 2 different lots it seems.

Would this show me the results I'm seeing?

Should I be trying to figure out the native white-point and gamma and doing something different when I'm calibrating?    

Sorry for all the newbie Q's

[Mark Guertin]

Sure enough they are different.  

One screen is 5600K and 340 cd/m2 other is 5500K and 357.1 cd/m2 (se attached snaps from end of calibrations done in "easy" mode)

[billg71]

mguertain, I'm a PC guy and don't pretend to know anything about Macs, but it sounds to me like you've got a video card/driver problem.

The differences you cite in the two monitors aren't really significant, and the purpose of calibration is to make everything look the same regardless of hardware differences, anyway. It sounds to me like either your card or your driver or the OS isn't accepting both calibration profiles, but instead applying one of them to both monitors. Have you downloaded and installed the latest drivers for your card? The ATI site says your card has dual LUT's so you shouldn't have a problem if you have the current driver for your OS.

I've run two monitors on my PC's for more than two years now, two different monitor setups on two different PC's, both using ATI cards and have had no problems calibrating with a Spyder2. I recently switched to the i1D2 and again, no problems.

In Windoze, I have a primary display channel and a secondary. I can access either and set the default profiles through the OS, I assume you can do the same with the Mac. The profiles you create with the i1 should have different names, can you find them and associate them with their monitors  and do they stay associated when you go back and check after a reboot and see which profile is tied to which monitor?

What you're seeing shouldn't be happening. Maybe you could disconnect one monitor temporarily and see if you can get a good calibration on the active monitor. If you can, I wouldn't think the i1D2 was the problem. If you can't, it's obviously bad. If you can get a good profile on one and not on the other, it sounds like a hardware/driver problem to me.

Maybe some knowledgeable Mac person will chime in.....

HTH,

Bill

[Mark Guertin]

Thanks for the reply Bill.  I ended up digging a bit further into the software and managed to do a calibration of the actual i1D2 unit and now things are working well.