NEC P221W Monitor w/ Spectraview II?

[photocat2007]

Hi All,

I'm considering getting the NEC MultiSync P221W monitor w/ the Spectraview II color calibration kit bundled with it as I currently have no monitor calibration software or hardware of any kind (and a decent but aging Gateway LCD monitor).

If, down the road, I get another monitor or even want to calibrate my current laptop monitor, can I do it with this bundled Spectraview II tool or will it only support specific NEC monitors?

Basically I'm wondering if it makes more sense in the long run to get a separate monitor calibration tool that isn't specifically designed/calibrated for NEC and go with the P221W that doesn't have the Spectraview II bundle.

Any thoughts or recommendations on this?

Many Thanks!
sue

 

[mihai2709]

Sue,

I bought NECs P221W in april 2009 and I am using BasICColor Display 4 with X-Rite DTP-49 to calibrate it. I am living in EUropt and getting Spectraview II here is a bit difficult.

However, I got this software with the NECs Will Hollingworth recommendation (it seems that it is using the same engine as Spectraview II software. Only the GUI is developped by a german company named basICColor.

I must tell you I am very happy with this combination, for me it works just fine.

I am using it for color corection in Lightroom/C1/Canon DPP and I am happy with it.

About your question, the Spectraview II software is indeed designed to work with NECs monitors. However, you will get some hardware calibrator in the bundle and if you change the monitor in thefuture, you can always buy another software that supports your new monitor. It would cost about 100 USD I guess. However, as I mentioned, I am very happy with the NEC P221W monitor, I intend to stick with them for now.

Enjoy the combination and please let me know the results. I might be interested in Spectraview as well in the long run.

 

[Andy Wai]

Hi All,

I'm considering getting the NEC MultiSync P221W monitor w/ the
Spectraview II color calibration kit bundled with it [...]
If, down the road, I get another monitor or even want to calibrate my
current laptop monitor, can I do it with this bundled Spectraview II tool
[...]?

There are two versions of the SpectraView calibration puck. The older version is an off the shelf Eye One Display 2. One interesting property of all Eye One devices is that they act as dongle to unlock the Eye One Match software, which you can download for free from the X-rite support site. I've tested this myself. It works!

The newer version SpectraView puck is still based on Eye One Display 2, but they did something to it so it works with wide gamut monitors. NEC says it would work with narrow gamut monitors as well. I guess things will be fine as long as it reports the monitor primaries correctly. Don't have this new version so never tested it with Eye One Match, but I don't see any strong reason why the combo shouldn't work.

Basically I'm wondering if it makes more sense in the long run to get a
separate monitor calibration tool that isn't specifically designed/calibrated
for NEC and go with the P221W that doesn't have the Spectraview II bundle.

A huge advantage of SpectraView is that it loads the monitor LUT instead of the one in the video card. This neatly gets around much of the 8-bit per color limitation of the video link. Or the other way around: If a 3rd party package doesn't load the NEC internal LUT, it's a huge disadvantage.

Andy