Customer Reviews

Spyder 3 Elite

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I have been dealing with ColorVision support for over a month now. I don't feel that Spyder3 or Printfix has been able to perform accurate results. Anytime you call their 800 support number you wait on hold for 20 minutes just to have some guy write an email to someone about your problem and tell you to wait for a response. When the response finally comes it is canned and doesn't actually answer your questions. I sent my equipment back under their 30 day money back period and have been waiting for 3 weeks for my refund. I wouldn't buy anything from ColorVision ever again. They need to learn how to support their customers and handle problems without a 24 hour waiting period for a canned response.

Edit: I did finally get my money back from Color Vision. I ended up buying an EyeOne set up and an love it. My screen is an exact match for my prints thanks to being able to profile both. Software is easy to use. Save yourself the grief and go with a Pantone solution from the start.

I have a Spyder2 Pro at home, and decided to get a Spyder3Elite for work. Mistake. The new software for the S3E is buggy and the UI is awful -- it's like they forgot everything they did right with the S2. There are many bugs, especially if you try to calibrate more than a single monitor -- half the time (or more), the calibration software gets the monitors confused. It will put the calibration patches up on one monitor, then when you get finished and select "Switch" to see before and after color LUTs, it switches color maps on the wrong monitor!

The UI is a catalog of what not to do with modal and modeless interfaces. Cancel in expert "Measure" doesn't take you back to the expert screen -- it takes you to some other random screen in the wizard sequence.

The close box is often not active -- instead you have to use File->Quit (and ColorVision's insulting tech support says they did this deliberately).

The list goes on and on, but The Big One: poor calibration! I ran both wizard mode and expert mode, then used the colorimeter to check the color temperature of gray patches, and the S3 calibrated colors were all over the map -- different by thousands of degrees. The S2Pro calibrated results were nearly spot on from near black to full white.

The S3 calibration software is in need of a complete re-write, at least from the UI perspective. This may be the best calibration hardware, but I can't tell since the software that drives it is so bad.

Maybe it works on Macs -- can't say -- don't use them. But on Windows, with an NVidia 8800 GTX, the Spyder2Pro is a much better bet, at least for now.

I received this only a few days ago but so far I really like it. I previously used the Huey and Spyder2pro and think this is worth the upgrade for professionals. The ambient light sensor is a good bonus compared to the previous version and the reduced size of the product is much easier to transport in a laptop case though nowhere near the huey in terms of portability.

Thus far I have only one critique but I hope it won't matter. The cable is a fair amount thinner than the Spyder2 and the counterweight is kinda tight so you have to be very careful not to damage the cable when moving the weight. It does come with a suction cup that is removable but I don't use it, preferring to use the counterweight since I don't care to clean suction cup marks off the screen (matter of choice.)

All in all I think this is a great upgrade to the Spyder2 though not an absolute necessary upgrade for people happy with the Spyder2. It is faster and more accurate (to my eyes anyway) and other than the somewhat thin cable, it seems well constructed.

I don't have an enormous history using calibrators so take these words with a grain of salt.

Hi All,

I purchased this on the advice of a very well known Photographer via Twitter. No names since he is very private...but I can tell you he is published and very very known in the industry.

I had a Huey pro which to me, worked, but did not work well enough as certain colors were washed out..etc. I asked this person for their advice and immediately was told to buy the Spyder 3 elite.

The box includes the Spyder 3, a desktop stand, a quick start guide, and a CD with the software for mac/windows.

Installation was a breeze - took about 5 minutes or less. First thing I would recommend is that after your initial install you launch the software, enter the serial number, and immediately download the software update so you have the latest.

Once updated I launched the software and went through the simple questions to start the calibration. Very easy again...the software told me where to put the spyder on the screen (with suction cup) and went to measure the colors etc. Here is where my problem comes in and takes away one star in this review. The SUCTION cup SUCKS! I made sure to tightly press it against the screen, but half way into the measurement it popped right off. BLAH...that's not good. The good news here is that you can remove the suction cup and start over with the spyder against the screen...use the usb cable with the included/attached weight to keep it straight and to avoid dangling. The usb cable has a weighted piece on it that you would hang from the back of your monitor to provide enough balance to the spyder.

Once its there, lauch the software and watch it measure the colors, etc...
Once the measurement is done, you put the device in a desktop stand that is included so that it can continue to monitor the ambient light in the room and adjust the display as necessary.

I use a Dell 3008fpw monitor and my calibration was awesome...the display looks 100% better then it did with the huey pro and 1000% better then factory settings.

I highly recommend this device...yes it is a bit expensive as compared to others, but it is worth its price due to to the features and accuracy of the measurements.

UPDATE: 04/22/09
I have since added a second monitor. I launched the Spyder 3 software and it immediately detected a new display. I went ahead and calibrated and Voila....the monitor profile was created and made it look a whole lot better then it did out of the box.

I continue to maintain my high rating on this device and would recommend it to anyone looking for a monitor calibration tool.

The software (3.1.4) has not worked on my dual monitor setup even though their own techsupport has tested my monitor(Wacom Cintiq,Viewsonic)/video card (matrox APVe) combination running on Vista. Sypder 2 worked but not the Elite3. Support has responded numerous times "that a new software release is due within a week and to wait". It has been almost 6 weeks and I'm still waiting. Don't buy this product. Not worth the headache.

I bought the Spyder Pro 3. It work's quite well though there have been issues with compatability with Vista. The company has been somewhat helpful in attempting to fix problems though as of today 5/2/08 and one month of calls still no fix. The software works great when I start up the computer but all the settings are gone if I put the copmputer to hibernate mode and then wake it up. The software works great on my XP just not Vista. Another problem is there higher up technical support has yet to answer an e-mail or return a phone call. I have no problem getting through to the lower level tech's who are happy to help just unable to resolve anything. If you have vista wait until this problem is fixed....

I like to think that I write very fair and balanced reviews. See my others for example. This is by far the worst review I have ever had to write.

Calibration means adjusting a device such that it produces the same result as a specified standard. That's the definition of the word. In my experience, this product does not actually calibrate anything.

I might even suggest that many of the "positive" reviews of this product come from people who have nothing to compare it against and therefore cannot see that it is giving them such dramatically different color casts every time. The human eye/brain substantially adjusts one's perception to compensate for huge variations in brightness and color, and therefore is a very poor tool for color calibration. It is necessary by fact of biology to actually compare color variations side by side to see any but the most dramatic differences. This is not derogatory of the happy customers. It is just a statement of fact. If I only had one monitor, I might have been blissfully and blindly happy with the third or fourth attempt and wrote the preceding efforts off as user error or "fine tuning"

Bottom line. I have wasted two days of my life and productivity trying to get this thing to give me the same results twice. Both of my monitors came out looking different from each other every single time, in exactly the same subdued natural lighting and location. The first time it produced a horrible blue cast on one and yellow on the other. The second time it insisted on lowering the white brightness to middle gray on one and a distinct purple cast on the other, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, (ad nauseum) times it started to maybe get in the ballpark of decent, but still insisted on producing two very different color results when I carefully ran through the matching sequence, and carefully set all of the temperature, gamma, brightness, contrast and everything to the exact same values.

The product also shipped with obsolete software. When you go to upgrade on the website, it tells you that you need to BUY AN ADDITIONAL LICENSE for the up-to-date software! I was furious, contacted the company, and to their credit, they did send me a current license code almost immediately at no charge.

This is important because both versions of the software produced inconsistent and impossible to reproduce calibrations. The current version was in fact less buggy and easier to use, but that's about it.

I would say that maybe each monitor was too different, and that was the problem, but one time it would make one blue and the other yellow, and then in attempting a recalibration it switched them around! So monitor differences are not causing that problem.

Suffice to say I am horribly disappointed. I expect that for $200 it should at the very least tell me if a monitor or video card or, for whatever reason, something has problems that cannot be corrected, but that isn't even the case. It made both monitors look just terrible almost every time and gave different results every time. I will be returning this product and getting something else.

This product couldn't be easier to use with excellent results. It seems that the only way to complicate the process is to not follow the directions. I was able to calibrate both of my monitors in a matter of minutes and the difference was instantly noticeable. I have used EyeOne in the past and thought the Spyder was easier to use and definitely cooler looking! After reading the other reviews on here and looking at the dates, they might have had issues with the old software, but the new software was very intuitive and efficient. Any serious digital photographer needs to have one of these to ensure consistent results.

The device gives consistent readings. But the software that comes with it is so poorly designed, and so buggy, that it makes the product completely worthless.

All of my monitor calibrations would come out very red in the highlights, and very green in the mid-tones. I verified this by using the "colorimeter" tool in the software, that allows for entering RGB values and obtaining readings. It confirmed what my eyes were telling me. Even immediately after color calibration, the resulting color profile was highly inaccurate. Obviously, the automatic calibration process was very buggy.

I tried to adjust the color curves target, to get a more accurate result. But bugs prevented me from doing that, as well. The help document states that one can click the "preview" checkbox to see the changes as one makes the adjustments. But there was no "preview" checkbox! I did see a preview as I adjusted the blue curve, but there was none as I adjusted the red and green curves. Then when I did not like the result, I hit the "cancel" button. But the cancel button does not work. The changes I made stayed, until I selected a pre-set color curve.

So I tried using the "colorimeter" tool in the software to set the calibration manually. Even this was buggy. Some color spaces (such as lab) have positive and negative possible values. But the "colorimeter" tool does not tell you if the result was positive or negative. When you have the value close to zero, you must experiment back and forth to see if you are off slightly by a positive number, or off slightly by a negative number. This makes using the tool extremely frustrating and time consuming.

Various other bugs exist. For example, the "X" in the window of the main application does not function. It does not close the application. One must choose "File" and "Quit" to exit. There are places where I accidentally started the wrong wizard, but the "back" button did not work. I was unable to close it from there, and had to open up the Windows Task Manager to kill the process. There are numerous factual, spelling, and grammatical errors in the help file.

It is inexcusable that a company would ship a product with software this bad. It is easily one of the buggiest software products I have ever used. It is so buggy, it makes the device largely unusable.

This product is not able to function enough to provide me any value.

I tried this on my samsung 22" and got a different color cast each time. I tried getting help from the tech support on the spyder 3 site and no one ever replied back. I guess the support ticket didn't really mean much. I looked on their forum and their are tons of unanswered help questions from their customers. That was enough for me , i sent this piece of junk back . If you where like me and listen to people on photography forums like DPR , don't buy this thing !!! Its over hyped by people who don't know what their talking about . The software is buggy , it would lose Profiles . I got the eye one 2 and couldn't be happier .


The spyder 3 elite isn't even as good as the old pantone huey . Why this is considered a pro tool is beyond me.

If you see anyone calling this thing a pro tool. Laugh and then smack them over the head with a news paper.


edit* No idea why it won't let me give it 1 star.