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NEC 2070 LCD calibration woes

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Redcrown

Redcrown

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I can't get a new NEC2070 calibrated. At least I think I can't. Looking for opinions and advice. Please bear with a long post.

I've been 5 days calibrating a new NEC2070 on a new Windows XP system. Started with an old, original model ColorVision Sypder. Gave up and bought a new GreyTag Eye One Display 2.

I'm comparing results side-by-side to my old system monitor, and to prints of the images displayed. Old system has a Samsung 172t calibrated with the old Spyder. Old system has matched prints very well in color, tone, and contrast.

The new NEC2070 system is beautiful, but... it does not visibly match the old system or the prints. NEC2070 color is either too red or too yellow, depending on which of dozens of calibrations I use. With the Eye One calibrations I trust the most, color is too yellow. Black hair girls have brown hair. Greytag color chart images look more yellow too.

But of more concern to me is tone and contrast. The NEC2070 calibrates brighter and lower in contrast. Shadow details are great, but far better than can possibly be printed. If I add a levels adjustment in Photoshop and lower the gamma (middle slider) to 0.85 AND add a small s-curve, the image tone and contrast starts matching the old monitor and prints.

The Eye One calibration I'm using was made with "Native" color mode on the NEC2070. The hardware Brightness setting came out at 36%, the contrast came out 52.5%. The Eye One target luminance was 120, but the summary window said current was 129.5.

I've trained my eye over 4 years on the old system for the tone and contrast I want, with good confidence that prints will match. I never had to "compensate" the image for printing. With this new system, I'm worried my trained eye will be fooled into making images too dark and contrasty.

What to do, what to do? Do newer LCDs have a dynamic range that is much greater than printers. Do I have to re-train my eye and/or start making two different versions of each image, one for dislay, one for print?

Or if you want your monitor to match prints, are you better off getting one with much less capability?

Also, a new question comes to mind. Does the graphic card make any difference in monitor calibration. Nothing I've read would indicate that. People who test and review monitors and calibrators never mention the graphic card used. But I'm starting to wonder?
 
I'd like to know the answer to this also, because I'm about to get a new monitor and the Nec 2070 is on my short list. (1600x1200 resolution, S-IPS panel, decent price... Sounds good in theory.) But calibratability is high on my list of concerns. They don't cover this on the spec sheet.

I just looked at the PDF manual for the 2070

http://www.necdisplay.com/corpus/3/A/2070NX_2170NXUsersManual.pdf

and was a bit concerned about all the auto-adjustments it has. I hope the auto-adjustments can be defeated. They can't do anything good for calibration.

If you don't get any answers here, try re-posting on the Printing forum. The color management experts tend to frequent the printing forum more than they do this forum.

Wayne
Redcrown said:
I can't get a new NEC2070 calibrated. At least I think I can't.
Looking for opinions and advice. Please bear with a long post.

I've been 5 days calibrating a new NEC2070 on a new Windows XP
system. Started with an old, original model ColorVision Sypder.
Gave up and bought a new GreyTag Eye One Display 2.

I'm comparing results side-by-side to my old system monitor, and to
prints of the images displayed. Old system has a Samsung 172t
calibrated with the old Spyder. Old system has matched prints very
well in color, tone, and contrast.

The new NEC2070 system is beautiful, but... it does not visibly
match the old system or the prints. NEC2070 color is either too red
or too yellow, depending on which of dozens of calibrations I use.
With the Eye One calibrations I trust the most, color is too
yellow. Black hair girls have brown hair. Greytag color chart
images look more yellow too.

But of more concern to me is tone and contrast. The NEC2070
calibrates brighter and lower in contrast. Shadow details are
great, but far better than can possibly be printed. If I add a
levels adjustment in Photoshop and lower the gamma (middle slider)
to 0.85 AND add a small s-curve, the image tone and contrast starts
matching the old monitor and prints.

The Eye One calibration I'm using was made with "Native" color mode
on the NEC2070. The hardware Brightness setting came out at 36%,
the contrast came out 52.5%. The Eye One target luminance was 120,
but the summary window said current was 129.5.

I've trained my eye over 4 years on the old system for the tone and
contrast I want, with good confidence that prints will match. I
never had to "compensate" the image for printing. With this new
system, I'm worried my trained eye will be fooled into making
images too dark and contrasty.

What to do, what to do? Do newer LCDs have a dynamic range that is
much greater than printers. Do I have to re-train my eye and/or
start making two different versions of each image, one for dislay,
one for print?

Or if you want your monitor to match prints, are you better off
getting one with much less capability?

Also, a new question comes to mind. Does the graphic card make any
difference in monitor calibration. Nothing I've read would indicate
that. People who test and review monitors and calibrators never
mention the graphic card used. But I'm starting to wonder?
Click to expand...
 
Nobody likes my CRT processed images, looks like everyone has the new gritty looking LCD's. So I am going to have to bite the bullet and get a LCD and learn how to calibrate it and myself to this new crunchy world.

--
http://www.pbase.com/roserus

Ben
 
Just try loading your old monitor's profile as a target for a new monitor. Eyeone has a botton right next to where you input the targets. Spyder2 Pro has an option like that as well.

Essentially if you use Native as a target you tell the software to not change it and leave it as it is. Obviously it won't help you with making one monitor looking similar to the other.

If Eyeone can't load Colorvision's profile just input the targets manually, preferably specifying the white point as x and y coordinates. The question is - do you get that information at some point at the end of calibration or during validation? It depends on the software used to calibrate the old monitor.

Which Spyder version do you have, BTW? And what settings you use over there for a target?
 
Mini Update on the Nec 2070 calibraion chase - I've discovered two new things.

Discovery one is the "Validator" in the Eye One software. A valuable, but well hidden and undocumented feature. Accessed from the "Help" menu (go figure) it tests your current profile and gives a result in a geek speak called De2000. Google "Eye One Validator" and you get very little. Google "de2000" and you get tons of math PhD white papers. All I can tell is that with the De2000 index numbers generated by the Eye One Validator, lower is better. A score of 1.0 is pretty good.

Discovery two is that my new graphic card (Nvidia 7300GT) has a software control panel, and it allows adjustments of many things, including Brigtness, Contrast, and Gamma. So it appears we can adjust these critical things in three places: on the graphic card, on the monitor itself, and in the calibration software. Sounds like a pretty good wrestling match. No calibration tutorials I've seen mention adjustments on the graphic card.

But... If if adjust the Gamma on the graphic card AFTER generating an Eye One profile, I get visual results that more closely match my old monitor, and more important, more closely match my prints. The graphic card Gamma adjustment is shown as a percentage. Default was 9%, I lowered it to 6%.

And... If I lower the grahpic card Gamma to 6% and then generate a new Eye One profile. The results are about half way bewteen the "no graphic card adjustment" and "post profile graphic card adjustment". Darker, but not as dark as old monitor and prints.

Perhaps more important... The Validator results of my Eye One profile with no graphic card adjustments was 1.17. The Validator results of a profile made AFTER lowering gamma with the graphic card was 0.62 (better).

So... still looking for tips or leads to gain better understanding of this challenge, in general, and the NEC 2070 in particular.
 
You are absolutely NOT supposed to adjust anything in the graphic card control panel neither before nor after calibration. You are basically trying to adjust videocard LUTs which are supposed to be used by calibration software itself. You are seting up a conflict for loading LUTs on startup as a side-effect. Not to mention that you are not supposed to adjust ANYTHING about your display after profiling it because the profile would describe a different state of the monitor.

Again, if you are trying to match a new monitor output to the old monitor output all you need is to set the white balance, luminance and gamma of your old monitor as targets for calibration of your new one. There's really no mistery there whatsoever.
 
You need to do it in Advanced mode and make sure in the summary of the results that the targets were actually achieved. And then run validation. Then restart the computer and run validation again to make sure LUTs are properly loaded on Startup.
 
klinikl said:
all you need is to set the white balance, luminance...
Click to expand...
I meant to say white point.

You need to set the actual white poin of an old monitor as a target. You can't use Native because it just keeps the white point of your new monitor as it is.
 
Dear Kinlikl,

Thanks for the feedback. I didn't completely understand your first reply, but now I think I'm getting your point.

Unfortunately, the old monitor is calibrated with an old Spyder and PhotoCal software. And the OSD offers limited choices of Brightness, Contrast, and Color Temperature expressed as "User Adjusted" of "Srgb". Neither PhotoCal or the OSD will tell what the white point, luminance or gamma are. So I don't know what targets to feed Eye One on the new system. I'm just guessing.

But forget the old monitor for a moment and focus on prints. It's prints we want to match. Eye One calibration of the NEC2070 results in a display that does not match prints in two ways. These are prints from an Espon 2200 using Imageprint RIP and from various pro labs.

First, color is a bit off. Not much, but enough to see visibly. Second, and more important, tone is off considerably. I'm assuming tone is primarily a factor of Gamma. When I do my trick of adjusting Gamma with the graphic card control to match prints, and then view one of the visual "gamma test" images from websites, I "see" a Gamma of 2.4. Without the graphic card adjustment I see Gamma of 2.2.

So I assume the old monitor was at Gamma 2.4, maybe 2.5. So I can and will try another Eye One calibration, with graphic card set to normal default, but give Eye One a 2.4 Gamma target. I understand that by using a Gamma of 2.4 I am degrading the capabilities of the monitor, but I'm beginning to believe that degradation is what is necessary to match prints.
 
Oh, OK.

For colormanaged applications it shouldn't matter which gamma target you use. You can try 2.4 in EyeOne - it's unusual but I can't see why it would be a problem. It can suppress too much shadow details in non-colormanaged applications but other than that should be fine... But the fact that you mention this indicates that there might be a problem somewhere else in your workflow - which program do you use to look at the images and what color settings it uses?

Now, if your monitors are close to each other you can measure the white point of the second monitor with the eyeone. At the point in the advanced calibration where you see "set the white point" select RGB presets and click start. Go through colorimeter position detection. Then move the colorimeter to the OTHER monitor and measure a pure white patch (255,255,255) created in, say, Windows Paint or just an empty text file. Note the number listed under "current" of the measurment panel of Match3. Go back to the beginning of calibration and set that number as a white point target ("custom" in the dropdown). Unfortunately it only gives you a K number - x and y would be better.
 
Obviously when you go back to the first step of the clibration process move the colorimeter back to the display you are calibrating...
 
Ben_Egbert said:
Nobody likes my CRT processed images, looks like everyone has the
new gritty looking LCD's. So I am going to have to bite the bullet
and get a LCD and learn how to calibrate it and myself to this new
crunchy world.
Click to expand...
I just moved from a good CRT to my first LCD (also the NEC 2070NX). While it's a very nice monitor, the first thing I noticed was that images on my web page, especially thumbnails, looked very crunchy. I've toned down the sharpness in the monitor, but it does make me wonder how my web pages appear to others with LCDs. I've been searching for more info, but yours is the first post I've found that mentions this issue. Are you then using less sharpening for images that might be displayed on an LCD?
 
migla9 said:
Ben_Egbert said:
Nobody likes my CRT processed images, looks like everyone has the
new gritty looking LCD's. So I am going to have to bite the bullet
and get a LCD and learn how to calibrate it and myself to this new
crunchy world.
Click to expand...
I just moved from a good CRT to my first LCD (also the NEC 2070NX).
While it's a very nice monitor, the first thing I noticed was that
images on my web page, especially thumbnails, looked very crunchy.
I've toned down the sharpness in the monitor, but it does make me
wonder how my web pages appear to others with LCDs. I've been
searching for more info, but yours is the first post I've found
that mentions this issue. Are you then using less sharpening for
images that might be displayed on an LCD?
Click to expand...
Not yet, I have not bought an LCD. I am still thinking about it, and there is no dount that some of my images are a bit crunchy. Landscapes seem ok, but bird images which are frequently cropped and required lots of post processing tend to look crunchy. Thats by looking on the oly LCD monitor I have, a Dell laptop, maybe not the best way to judge.

--
http://www.pbase.com/roserus

Ben
 
migla9 said:
Ben_Egbert said:
Nobody likes my CRT processed images, looks like everyone has the
new gritty looking LCD's. So I am going to have to bite the bullet
and get a LCD and learn how to calibrate it and myself to this new
crunchy world.
Click to expand...
I just moved from a good CRT to my first LCD (also the NEC 2070NX).
While it's a very nice monitor, the first thing I noticed was that
images on my web page, especially thumbnails, looked very crunchy.
I've toned down the sharpness in the monitor, but it does make me
wonder how my web pages appear to others with LCDs. I've been
searching for more info, but yours is the first post I've found
that mentions this issue. Are you then using less sharpening for
images that might be displayed on an LCD?
Click to expand...
I just got my first LCD (HP LP2065) last week and noticed the same thing. Everything is sharper, including images. I looked at my own images on PBase and found a few that were horrible enough (on my LCD) that I immediately re-did them with less USM. Luckily, most of them are within the bounds of acceptability (but a bit sharper than is now optimal), so I'll probably leave them the way they are.

In the future, I won't use as much USM on images that are destined for the web. I have a CRT as my second monitor, so I'll cross check on it.

I'm using a VGA interface to my LCD and "Sharpening" is grayed out in my OSD. Presumably, this is only available when using the digital interface, correct?

Wayne
 
Wayne Larmon said:
I'm using a VGA interface to my LCD and "Sharpening" is grayed out
in my OSD. Presumably, this is only available when using the
digital interface, correct?
Click to expand...
It might depend on the monitor, but, yes, my NEC is connected via a digital interface. I'm about to connect another NEC to my other machine that has only analog, so I'll be able to check that too.
 
I just one week ago replaced my CRT with 2070NX and I know what you are talking about. But my previously processed images look fine since I have always disliked anything that approaches over sharpening. Also nice is that the big jpg images out of my Nikon D200 now really show sharpness. I can also see that the Nikon 18-200VR is really a good lens overall.

But, I wonder, how many others of "us" out there in web land have decent monitors? Even a decent CRT, not any more I bet. (My sister uses an ancient CRT that ghosts, a gamma of about 1.5, contrast jacked up, color temperature of around 4000, etc). I suspect many or most people have LCD screens with TN technology that makes looking at photos torturous. It would be a interesting survey to know the percentage of DPReview readers that have a good calibrated photo monitor.
regards - tom
 
In a way, that's like buying a quality recording of a symphony orchestra and playing it on a cheap, tinny boombox ... certainly not what the artists intended.
 
migla9 said:
Wayne Larmon said:
I'm using a VGA interface to my LCD and "Sharpening" is grayed out
in my OSD. Presumably, this is only available when using the
digital interface, correct?
Click to expand...
It might depend on the monitor, but, yes, my NEC is connected via a
digital interface. I'm about to connect another NEC to my other
machine that has only analog, so I'll be able to check that too.
Click to expand...
I finally set up the other NEC 2070NX via an analog connection ... it shows the Sharpening entry under Tools just as the one on the digital interface.
 
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