Vista monitor calibration failures

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Posted By
babaloo
Apr 27, 2007
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807
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Veni, Vidi, Vista: a cautionary tale.
I have Vista and XP pro in a dual boot system with an LCD monitor connected by digital cable to an Nvida video card. Dual core, gobs of memory, SATA up the yin yang.
I have Monaco Optix and Spyder II calibrators. The monitor calibrates well with either calibration system under XP and yields a monitor image that works satisfactorily for color management.
The Monaco Vista software driver simply will not run under Vista and their tech support is of no help whatever. A curse on their house. No, a double curse. The Monaco goes to Ebay.
The Spyder Vista drivers work. However it is impossible to calibrate the same monitor under Vista no matter what settings are used in the monitor. Presuming you are familiar with the Spyder software: under Vista the initial calibration run yields color bars that are wildly off, with red far below the target box, green and blue far above and a difference in the 9 range. This is not correctable, because it is a spurious reading, and no matter what the hardware settings in the monitor, including those which calibrate so well with XP, similar initial readings are obtained. Under XP the initial calibration run yields a profile that can be optimized by tweaking the RGB sliders but is already very close to optimal with the monitor settings at their default values.
If the monitor is set on the same hardware settings that calibrate well under XP, but yield that spurious initial Vista calibration screen, and the Vista Spyder calibration program is run to completion a profile will be derived but there is a warning box that the gamma setting could not be reconciled to the measured data. Although this is what Colorvision recommends the resulting profile is too incaccurate for color management. I just wasted a lot of paper and ink proving that.
It is possible to load the monitor calibration derived under XP into Vista, as a profile is a profile. This yields a much better, nearly usable monitor image but not one that prints with the same degree of fidelity as under XP. Presumably this is because of differences in the XP and Vista Nvidia drivers which must differ in their default brightness/contrast/color settings. Am I the only one with a different kind of "wow" experience with Vista than Microsoft pitches in its ads?

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