Jacken’s Blog

I’ve had my screen calibrator, the Colorvision Spyder2 now for a couple of weeks and here is my impressions of it. The calibration result is good, I’ve tried it on my Powerbook, my stationary machine, a dual G4 with a 22″ Apple Cinema display and a 15″ Sony LCD and my wifes iMac G4. The improvement is noticeable, not as much on my hand-crafted calibrated screens using the program SuperCal, (a good alternative if you don’t have the money to spend on a hardware calibrator), but still an improvement. I can now for the first time use the profile preview in Photoshop and get a printout that matches the screen. The program that comes with the unit is easy to use. There are some annoyances. First off, the calibration is slow. And if you have more than one screen connected, you can’t calibrate them. To do that you have to pay more money and get the Pro version. And oh how I hate when you have to pay more to not get a watered down version of a program. It’s not like they had to spend any more time to add multiple screen support so why have to pay extra for it? You can just disconnect one of the screens and do the calibration anyway, but it’s an annoyance. And last but not least, today when I was about to do an re-calibration the program refused to start up. I just got an dialog box telling me that the program had expired. I had to download an update from their web site. Holy flying shit on a pogostick how stupid. What if I was on the road without an internet connection? Why not just use a nag dialog box instead with the text “Download new version, click continue to use the outdated version”? I guess you could just move the date back a week or two but anyway.

Would I recommend this unit? If you don’t have a couple of hundred dollars to spend on a more advanced calibrator, this one is ok, but there is some annoying things with it. But do I really need to calibrate my display? If you want to get accurate colors when viewing pictures, and also get the best possible quality of on-screen text you need to calibrate. This unit does the job satisfactory.