William,
Ultimately, and particularly with an LCD monitor, I suspect you will get the best results using a colorimeter. I’ve read good comments about the Huey but haven’t heard of the Spyder Express until your post. A quick search on Google turned up a favorable review of the latter, which doesn’t surprise me since the Spyder products have been around a while and should be mature. However, one drawback according to a thread I found at dpreview (
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1017&me ssage=20672181) is that the Spyder Express is limited to calibration of a single monitor. That was one reason I went with the Monaco OptixXR when I bought it (more pricey though), as it has no such licensing restrictions. The thread at dpreview is specifically asking about the Huey vs. Spyder Express for a Mac, but the platform shouldn’t matter much if any. Some favor the Huey, others don’t. But, at least the Huey sounds as if it doesn’t have a restricted license like the Spyder and it also offers the benefit of being an ambient light monitor, which may improve your results…I really don’t know.
Something you might want to try out as another software alternative for profiling, in lieu of Adobe Gamma since it isn’t designed for LCDs, is Praxisoft WiziWyg. Hmmm…well, I see it doesn’t appear available through Praxisoft, as all I got for their site was a blank page with logo only. But, it is available at <
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/win/8064>. And another option is QuickGamma which Norman Koren mentions on his site as being a good utility. The developer’s website where you can freely download both QuickGamma and the companion QuickMonitorProfile is <
http://quickgamma.de/indexen.html>. I’d suggest seeing what either WiziWyg or QuickGamma/QuickMonitorProfile can do for you since they’re free. If you don’t like the results you can pursue a colorimeter.
Hope that helps,
Daryl
