I do have strong disagreements with several people’s comments about stock settings on any device, various comments about other ways to set things, etc.

Contrary to what many have said, no mass-market consumer items have ever had any kind of decent calibration. Manufacturers don’t want to bother, and most intentionally mis-calibrate devices. TV’s and monitors have always had brightness set too high, and colors over-saturated. In a store, to an untrained eye, it makes them look better. Similarly, audio stores set the volume and bass too high on the products they want to push, because in the store to an untrained ear, it makes them sound better relative to other products. Too-high brightness is hard on the eyes, it shortens the life of CRT’s and LCD backlights, it reduces the legibility of text, and wipes out details in photos and videos. I had to reduce the backlight on my LCD to zero (that’s not off, just its minimum value), yet Lutcurve indicated that white levels were still too high, resulting in some loss of detail. As the instructions state, you should always adjust such things via hardware settings before resorting to software and video card settings. There are always interactions among hardware controls. While brightness can affect peak white, it primarily affects black level. Contrast can impact both white and black levels. It’s not at all true that there aren’t standards for gray-scale discrimination and colors. Windows has added increasingly sophisticated support for color-matching, which the more expensive high-quality devices will use, and the cheap mass-market ones won’t bother with (sometimes, users with hardware calibration equipment will post color profiles for devices which don’t come with them). Proper calibration cannot make things look worse, only improper calibration can do that. Lutcurve primarily affects gamma, it’s not designed for color-matching. It’s true that all devices are different and none have perfect color and gray-scale reproduction (in fact, even the most expensive displays and printers technically aren’t very good), and there are numerous other aspects to display quality on monitors. Usually, you have to make compromises. The image I posted showing Vista color settings indicates how Windows allows different matching compromises to be made based on the task at hand. In most cases, you should go for correct gray-scale gamma over correct color gamma, when you can’t achieve both, which you can’t on most devices. As for technology, LCD’s have a few advantages, but tons of disadvantages compared to CRT’s, no matter how expensive the panel (i.e., they all suck). There are so many competing technologies and variations of each, that it’s hard to tell which will eventually be the best. Long-term, I expect some form of OLED will be the best. At the present time, high-quality plasma displays are probably the best for most consumers, but that technology, like all flat-panel technology, is primarily targeted at televisions, not computer monitors. Used as a computer display, a plasma display would probably be susceptible to image burn-in, and they draw a lot of power (except maybe for expensive LED backlights, LCD backlights, typically fluorescent, also draw a lot of power because they’re on in the black areas).

So I instantly opened the program and ran through it without reading the manual. Although I did not make any changes. Just ran through it.

Saw that the pages were quite intuitive. Had same complaint as Lost in Lodos (#54) that the text on each page was small. Other than that it is a great program. I’m glad to report that my swap meet monitor ($10 … 21″ … NEC Multisync XP21) is near perfect and I did not have to make any permanent changes. I did play with the controls a bit but did not save any changes.

This is one heck of a program and is a must have for graphic artists and would be great for printing shops too.

You are wrong about gamma. PCs use gamma 2.2, whereas Macs used gamma 1.8

Those of you who may be calibrating LCDs, be sure that your angle of view remains constant and consistent with your usual angle of view, ideally, your angle of view should be 90 degrees to the screen. If you view an LCD at an angle while using Lutcurve, you may end up calibrating incorrectly.

http://www.hex2bit.com/products/product_mcw.asp

Only thing I see is that MCW does not tell what gamma and color temperature is it calibrating to.

Surprisingly useful little tool. Does what it says it will.

Only 2 complaints:
The text notes on each page showed up VERY small on all 4 monitors I tested this on; LG 52LG50, BenQ G2200W, HP w2207h, and Sony HMD-a200. Tiny enough I had to nudge right up to the monitors to see the text. And the text contrast is terrible. There are far better colour choices they could have gone with.

Won’t load under Wine.

As a side note, no Windows 9x support. To bad considering how many still use them.

You can’t do better than this price, at FREE.

There are better hardware based units out there to chose from, but they start around $500 for anything that can do better than this. The $499.97 DavO Color Monitor Adjuster has been my preference, marketed as (or by) Avad. Something to check into to (was covered in CEP about a 18 months ago) if you’re hardcore.

As for software alternatives, not sure. Others have posted their notes. So read through the other posts for ideas.

My understanding of it is that any picture displayed should ideally be portable — viewable anywhere while looking the same. A MAC displaying a tif file should look the same as that tif displayed on a PC. Resized it should look the same on your cell phone, or an HDTV for that matter.

At one time MACs used a fairly different display, & you altered things like your web site colors very slightly so they’d see the same thing roughly as using a PC. But that was for the MAC folks as consumers — you didn’t want to leave them out. Today, while you’d for example still want your site looking good in whatever MAC browser, If/When a MAC’s used for production work, it’s expected to stick to the same requirements as any PC, including displaying images accurately, which isn’t too hard when they’re using the same LCDs. Besides, AFAIK most big rendering facilities are on PCs anyway — the MACs are odd man out, & should be matching them. ;-)