Customer Reviews

Display Calibration Bundle with custom Sensor Colorimeter & Sw

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Using this package I was able to calibrate my display for regular use, print matching in Photoshop, Lightroom, and other programs. Yes it cost a fair amount, but if you are going to spend the money for a top notch display you might as well shell out the feww extra bucks and calibrate it properly. Believe me when I say the difference in color accuracy after I calibrated the display is astounding!

Actually, there's not much to say and I'm also not going to be technical here. If you can afford to buy one of these monitors (not necessarily NEC) you should equip yourself with a hardware/tool allowing you to maximize your monitor's capabilities. Personally, I always like to use dedicated hardware which is not always coming cheap but hay, at the end, it's an investment which will pay off in the future if you're planning to become a professional graphic designer, photo editor or any type of multi-platform designer where colour reproduction and quality is highly demanded.

Only with the Spectraview II software can you easily calibrate the internal 14bit 3D LUT.

You could try to build a calibration with multi-profiler alone (comes free with the monitor), however, you need to use some external program to measure the white point and primary locations and white luminance and then enter the custom values in yourself and then you'd get a top quality calibration too however the associated .icc profile made by MP would be wrong as it would list the programmed values instead of the measured values.

The custom NEC i1D2 probe works very well with SV II + a wide gamut NEC PA monitor. They custom calibrate the probe to NECs wide gamut displays. Using SV II it reports reasonably similar values to my $900 i1 Pro, although the i1 Pro does appear to do a bit better.

If you Google "Sprectraview II problems" you'll get...no kidding...397,000 hits, and in my opinion, that tells it all. I purchased this product along with two NEC P221W monitors, which the program would not recognize and communicate with, even though NEC's literature states they will. And, after two weeks of tearing my hair out - and finding a correcting download in spite of instead of because of the NEC website, the recognition problem was solved. For the time being, the calibration program did a great job, and my photos never looked better.

But recently, I had a faulty hard drive replaced, and guess what? Right back where I started. I purchased and downloaded the latest version of Spectraview, which seems to have solved the recognition problem. But it just won't run, and checking on the web, I find that there's apparently a problem with the 1.1.08 version running on Windows 7. What I need is version 1.1.07 rev. 1, but go to the NEC website and try to find it. Go ahead - I dare you.

This could be a great product, but it's over-engineered, finnicky, complex, and poorly supported by the manufacturer's website. Run away from it and get something like the Spyder program.

Spend $270 for Spectraview II, then find in the fine print in the manual that it does not work with some of the more advanced laptops out there. For me, a total waste of money. Furthermore, read the directions for removing the light cover, or you will (and I did) crack the case on the calibrator so that it cannot be returned. For me, the NEC route was a major loser in an effort to get a top quality system for photo editing.