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I've managed to "beg, borrow, steal.." a Spyder3 calibrator for a couple of days and was hoping to do some calibration on my "unclean" TFT monitor. I've tried a couple of iterations of "calibration" but I'm feeling like I'm getting mixed results and so far haven't been super satisifed with what I'm seeing... Here's where you come in!

So some specs:

Monitor: Acer x223w
Video Card: ATI Radeon x1300 Series (connected via DVI)

On the first pass of the software, I used the brightness & contrast adjustments to sort out the white & black levels and then calibrated. While that looked OK post-calibration, it was perhaps a little dark (white point of 37.5 cd/m2). All of the other settings/values appeared to be well within "spec".

A subsequent pass (post-read of the help file!) has been completed. The monitor was reset to factory default prior to that pass. No adjustment of black/white level (pre-cal?). This too looks ok, although perhaps a little bright for my liking...? White point is now in the mid 170 cd/m2 range. required?

While I can appreciate that there maybe no "standard" solution here, what should I be aiming for? I don't do much print work (so far), and just wanted to try and achieve some accuracy on what I'm looking at.

Help...?

This may, or may not, help....since I had adifferent monitor and video card. I posted a "how I did it" on my very infrequently updated blog. The post does go on a bit, but I found that before calibrating I needed to set both the monitor AND the video card to their default values. After you've done the calibration run the drycreek tests (website address in the blog post) to see if you're on the right track.

http://blowies.blogspot.com/search?upda ... -results=8