Hardware screen colour calibrators

[rek]

Has anyone here got some experience with the low-end colour calibrators that are around? The three I'm looking at are:

Pantone Huey
Pantone Huey Pro
Colorvision Spyder2 Express

Right now the one I'm most likely to get is the standard Huey (and upgrade the firmware/software to Pro if need be). The main thing I'll be doing is calibrating a couple of ThinkPad panels, and also a couple of dual-head desktops. I know most of these have no official support for dual-head calibration, but apparently you can get around this by renaming the icc profiles the calibration utilities create.

My X60t seems to have a low native colour temperature compared to other panels; I've calibrated by eye to make it look "similar" to the others, but now the cat is out of the bag I'm thinking that it'd be nice to have consistent and correct colour across all computers.

[RealBlackStuff]

Ask erik, one of our mods here. He is very much into stuff like that.

[Johan]

Ask erik, one of our mods here. He is very much into stuff like that.

Also, as indicated in the thread Questions regarding colorvision spyder usage with thinkpads, search this forum for (color calibration posts by) WPWoodJr - and my young countryman here on the forum, Troels is also a capacity in displays.. so I would surprised if he didn't know athing or two also about color calibration.

Kindly posts back her your recommendations and experience - thanks!

Johan

[erik]

i own a gretag macbeth eye-one display2 pro colorimeter and ICC coloreyes match software.   i'm not too familiar with the lower-end setups but in the end they do the same thing.   the differences in price come down to the finite accuracy of the colorimeter, equipment, and ultimately the result.

what do you do with your display?   are you calibrating because colors look 'off' or because you are working in a creative field and need to match images for press output or distribution?   if it's the former then pick whichever colorimeter has the features you need that fits into your budget.   if it's the latter then you should consider increasing your budget to at least $175~275 for the next-higher step in equipment.

if i had to pick between your three options above, i'd probably give the huey a try simply because i use pantone products and am familiar with their support.   datacolor's support doesn't get as high of marks.

[rek]

I do a lot of web work, so accurate colour is good but given most peoples' monitors are out of whack it's not particularly critical.. working in government/education, much of the challenge is in accessibility and clear presentation, rather than having whiter whites and brighter colours etc.

Both desktops (home and work) are multimonitor setups, where having them matched would be a great help, and the primary reason why I'm bothering to go to this amount of trouble.

In the end I managed to pick up a second hand full calibration bundle on the cheap from eBay: a Spyder2 Pro, and a Printfix printer calibrator. Don't have time to try them out yet (the parcel arrived this morning) but the boxes look nice and shiny so far..