Dual monitor under XP64 question

[mi75]

Most of my questions and concerns have been answered using the search but I have one that I can't find an answer to.

 

I've been running a single Dell 2709W monitor for all my work. Yesterday I decided to move to a dual monitor setup using my old Samsung 2233BW as the 2nd monitor. I'm running XP64 and I calibrate all my monitors with a Spyder3Pro.

 

I realise XP64 can't use two ICC profiles, one for each monitor and that the Windows color management download program also doesn't run on 64bit OS. As annoying as that is, unfortunately there's nothing I can do about that. So what I decided to do was only calibrate the Dell and use that single profile on both monitors and adjust the controls on the Samsung until it looked okay since it will only be used for Email, Web ref., etc.... nothing that needs color management.

 

The problem now is when I go to "display properties" pick monitor 1 the Dell and go to "Advanced" -> "Monitor" it shows the monitor type as Dell. BUT if I go to "Color Management" tab it shows the current monitor as the Samsung. The same thing happens in the Spyder3Pro when I calibrate, it shows the monitor type as Samsung with no other option. I did the calibration anyway and it seems to look fine, as it did before connecting the 2nd monitor.

 

Any suggestion on why display properties shows it as Samsung under color management or whether that's likely to be a problem ?

 

Thanks in advance, hope the long post made sense.

 

Mart

[Tim Nelson]

All I can say right now is that you definitely can have a profile for each monitor in xp64. I have the Spyder Pro and I just use the profile chooser program that comes with it. I'll try to take a little more time tomorrow for a more in depth response if needed.

[mi75]

You gave me short lived hope Tim.

 

I just updated my Datacolor software and it allowed me to create two profiles, one for each monitor but windows will only allow me to use one of those profiles. It seems that some dual head video cards will allow the two profiles to run and others won't. I have a ATi 4870 1Gb dual head which doesn't seem to allow it under XP64.

 

After doing some more searching I found this on the datacolor site.

http://support.datacolor.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=1224

 

 

 

 

---

Edited October 1, 2009 by mi75

[Matt McDonald]

have a look at this:

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/37044-icc-profiles-dual-monitors-xp64.html

[mi75]

thanks for the link.

[Jeff Mottle]

The only way to have a separate profile for each display is to find a card that supports dual LUTs or have one card per display. Certainly you can use your calibration device to calibrate each display, but you can't profile the displays seperately with one card that supports a single LUT. Worth noting is that you can only calibrate both displays if they allow you to manually control separate color R G B channels for the color temperature and allow contrast and brightness adjustments. Most LCDs (except really high end models) perform all of these adjustments for calibration at the LUT level via DDC. Meaning a file is edited, rather than hardware, to bring the display to a known state.

 

If you calibrate and profile one display and then do the second display (assuming a single LUT card) you will run into problems.

 

The profile you create from the second display is the last one you created and thus will be the one used. If your display can not adjust all of the settings manually then the calibration settings for the second display will be written to your LUT. Effectively the last display you calibrate and profile is the one that is going to be loaded at windows boot by the calibration loader (Spyder, XRITE etc.)

 

Higher end displays will let you write the LUT to the display and not to the OS for the video card to load. They also allow you to control your display manually, rather than tweaking a LUT to bring your display to a known state. This allows for higher accuracy and less chance of color banding.

Edited October 1, 2009 by Jeff Mottle