Posted 04 April 2007 - 11:07 PM
Respectfully, I'm getting weary of the discussion. Suffice it to say I've been working with color management (CM) and color managed work flows for some ten years and most of the reactionary replies to my post make it clear people don't really know or understand a lot of what they are talking about. That's harsh for me to say, but that is how I see it.
So let me be clear about a couple of things. Most people regularly use the terms calibrate and profile as if they are the same thing and/or are interchangeable - they are not and they are very different processes with very different purposes. When I speak of monitor controls, I am not talking about only good CRTs. Early LCDs that had few controls and more often than not they were problematic at best - but the more problematic issue was that people dealt with LCDs as though they were CRTs - they are completely different beasts and have to be approached, from a CM perspective completely differently. In the last couple of years, though, I have seen higher quality LCDs gaining more controls that do work more like controls on CRTs have traditionally worked - making it possible to calibrate and profile some LCDs - all with the use of good software and a colorimeter. There are plenty of well-meaning knot-heads around who will tweak monitor settings based on their eyes and think they are doing themselves a favor - but that's been happening for closer to fifteen years or more. Had some merit in controlled ways fifteen years back - it has little now. CM has come a long way and I'm glad for it.
And for the record - calibration is about tweaking a display so that it not only hits a given target, but does so as spectrally neutral as the display is capable of (like tweaking the guns/gain/bias/etc. on a CRT. That is to say, just because someone chooses 6500 or D65 as a temp for a given display doesn't mean it is neutral (neutral as in equal parts of red, green, and blue when viewing neutral grays) - none are out of the box that I have worked with, so the natural result of that is neutral grays aren't displayed as neutral, but instead have a color cast - which of course can be dealt with in a profile - but it's far better to start with a neutral display, then profile it to capture it's idiosyncrasies in the profile, so Photoshop, etc. can work through that profile to give us something as accurate as possible. I'll take a display I can calibrate and profile any day over one that I can only profile. The truth is I'm still using CRTs for my color critical work, but I expect to have to replace them within a year or two. Thankfully LCDs have come a long way over the last few years and they are far better than they were five years ago, but they still have some intrinsic liabilities because most of them are first and foremost not designed for color critical print work. They certainly can be used for it, but you have to know what you are doing and be mindful of their weaknesses - even as we had to be with CRTs.
Without question, Apple displays tend to be a cut above many of the displays, but like all displays, work best with the benefit of accurate profiling, otherwise they tend to be too bright and too warm. I've seen this in nearly every one I've ever worked with, whether it was one of the first 15" models or the newest 30". And even with profiling they still tend to show shadow detail that won't be reflected in printed products. If people know how to properly soft-proof, then that, too, can be overcome and they can give excellent results. My problem, apparently, is that I had the gall to suggest there are less expensive displays that can do an equal or better job . . . and I still stand by that.
Cheers!
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