Calibrate your monitor, Speed up boot times

Anyone who sits looking at a monitor all day, then perhaps goes home and looks at another, will know one thing about them: Two screens are rarely the same. Ian Evenden

One may be brighter than the other, or have more yellow in its output, and while these discrepancies may be forgivable in a simple office machine, if you have a twin-screen setup, you’ll want the displays to output the same brightness and color temperature. This is especially true if you’ve mixed and matched your monitors, because the Asus 4K model on the right you got for gaming may not match the BenQ 1080p screen on the left you use for Google Docs and email.

The color output of your screen becomes an issue if you’re printing, too. While no amount of ink on paper, which is dependant on the light it reflects, can reproduce the color intensity of an image backlit by thousands of tiny glowing cells, a calibrated screen can at least ensure you don’t end up with a print that’s wildly darker or lighter than you expected—especially annoying if you’ve ordered hundreds from an online service.

We’re using the lowest-cost Spyder calibration device here, but if you want more control over your screen, more expensive models are available. You can also use Windows 10’s built-in controls, and we’ll go over those, too.

TURN ON YOUR SCREEN

This may sound obvious, but it’s a good idea to do something else for half an hour before beginning the calibration process. This allows the screen to warm up [Image A], and display its true colors—it may be darker and less vibrant when it’s just switched on. You’ll also want to use each screen’s on-screen display to reset its brightness and contrast to neutral levels, as if it had just come out of the box. This is also a good time to dig out the exact make and model of your screen—you might need it later.

ENTER THE SPYDER

If you’re using a calibration device, now’s the time to take it out of its box. We’re using a Datacolor Spyder 5 Express [Image B], but other brands are available. It’s an entry-level device, and will calibrate your screen to an industry standard color reference, though it neglects to say what that standard is. This means you don’t get a choice of calibrations based on what looks best for you, Spyder knows best, and you accept what it gives you. Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t nudge the brightness up a bit once it’s finished, but this may come back to bite you when you start printing. If you choose to upgrade your Spyder software to a more expensive version, you get a lot more choice about how the calibration is applied, but we’re using the entry-level version here.

TAKE OFF THE LENS CAP

There’s a lens cap on the Spyder device. We failed to remove it the first time, and wondered why it didn’t work. Under the cap is something that looks rather like a plastic honeycomb, with an ambient lighting sensor on the other side. Install the software that comes with the device, and make sure there’s a spare USB port in easy reach of your screen. The documentation recommends not using a hub, but we ran it through a powered USB 3 hub with no apparent problems. Run the Spyder software, take in what it says about light falling on your screen and resetting the color temperature, plug in the colorimeter, then hit “Next” [Image C]. If multiple screens are detected, you’re asked which monitor you want to calibrate (it only recognized one of ours, cataloguing the other as “Generic PnP”), then hit “Next” again. It’s a wizard-based process, so is easy to follow.

WHAT EXACTLY IS IT?

If your monitor hasn’t been recognised correctly, you need to feed this into the software. First, tell it whether you’re calibrating a desktop or laptop, then paste the make and model into the next screen [Image D]. Hit “Next.”

BALANCING ACT

This is the point at which you need to introduce the calibrator to your screen; the software tells you where to put it [Image E]. Make sure it’s plugged in and the lens cap is removed. The lens cap slides on the cable, and can be used as a counterweight, so you hang the cable over the top of your screen, with the calibrator at the front, and the cap at the back. It’s a nice idea, but the cap isn’t nearly heavy enough, and the calibrator tends to swing around and lose contact with the screen. We tilted our screen backward, as it’s on an arm mount, so it made better contact, but still had to hold the cable at the top of the screen to stop it moving. If you need to hold the colorimeter in place for the full calibration process, it not only gets boring, but makes your arm ache, too. Be sure to have your cell phone in easy reach, because you won’t be using your computer. The calibration process takes around five minutes, while your screen cycles through black, white, and different colors of varying brightnesses.

FINISHED

When the process is finished, remove the calibrator, making sure to put the lens cap back on to protect it, and hit the “Finish” button on screen. You’re prompted to save the calibration profile, which will be loaded into your video card every time you switch your PC on, and choose an interval at which you’ll be reminded to recalibrate your screen. We’ve chosen to recalibrate ours in a month’s time, because the change in color temperature of the ambient light as the year wears on can alter how you perceive your screen’s colors. Monitors also change as they age, with subtle differences in the color output between opening the box and now.

BACK AND FORTH

The software now shows a series of images, and enables you to flip between calibrated and uncalibrated views [Image F], so you can see how much difference it’s made. If you’ve got another screen, you can go on to calibrate it in an attempt to match its output to the calibrated monitor.

The Spyder app moves itself to the screen you choose from its drop-down menu, saving you the effort of using the mouse to drag it across.