Help! huey / radeon / gamma problems.

what is the relationship between the display, the calibration device and software, and the video card?

i am having a devil of a time trying to print and get a near match to my screen. i have to print at gamma 1.5 in my epson 3800's advanced settings window, yet my monitor roughly checks out at gamma 2.2[through use of several on-line screen tests. i know they are not super accurate, but they're not so inaccurate to account for this disparity!]

i am using a huey, upgraded to the new 'pro' to calibrate my lcd monitor, which is also not the best, and i have a radeon 9550 agp video card. each of these 3 have their own controls. the huey calibration seems to override the video card's settings, and the monitor's controls override the huey. what is very odd is that the default settings for the radeon is gamma 1.0, and if i change that to a higher gamma the screen gets much LIGHTER, not darker. i think this is really weird. i can't seem to get all this sorted. all the sites on gamma go into lots of technical detail about gamma, black and white points, color space, etc., and i roughly get all that, but i cannot find practical assistance on how to coordinate these 3 things.

epson tech support says it's not their problem, and i think that might be true. pantone's top expert in tech support was impatient but ultimately did not really know what to say about possible card/huey conflicts [there is one faq posted in the pantone knowledge base that identifies in general terms a known bug with radeon cards, but says that a driver upgrade solves this]. the radeon tech support people don't seem to know what monitor calibration is.

somehow the printer is getting the wrong 'signal' about my monitor's gamma settings---the monitor's 2.2 must be manually dropped down to 1.5 in the epson, as i said, and the thing is that even that is not quite right--- and the huey and the radeon card don't agree with one another.

i need assistance, please.

PC world magazine reported that most radeon drivers would need to be updated before the huey would calibrate properly. I'm surprised their tech-support didn't know this; it's a well documented bug.

kdparnell

and several other upgrades to other stuff i had to do before i could do the upgrade!

still having problems...i've been struggling with this for 2 weeks now, and its only getting worse [now that i see what great output i CAN get, i'm getting pickier :-/ ]. 8 hours yesterday alone in tech support and various uninstall/install routines.

it's an especially bothersome problem for trickier shots---low light, low contrast, subtle coloring, etc. bright, high contrast shots tend to mask the problem. but in those others, the problem can be severe enough to make the image a 'no-go'. this workaround of a gamma drop in the epson settings would be ok if they allowed for more user manipulation, but there are only 3 settings.

so i need to shake this out. i'm geariing up to start selling prints.

If you have ATI CCC (Catalyst Control Center) installed, it may be reverting your calibration back to the default uncalibrated state. This happens to me although I use ColorEyes Display to calibrate. If I uninstall only the CCC (not the display driver) the problem goes away.

thanks for that tip. i'll try it. i'm seriously considering just getting another card from a different maker. when i think of the time i've lost on this....

anyone else out there?