I have a dell monitor with a tn panel @165 hz. I want to calibrate it so it can be as accurate as possible and I checked out some videos but those all seemed to refer to the basic windows calibration or advertised the spyder thing. Does anyone know a reliable free method?
Is this for professional use or for personal everyday use? If it’s for professional, I would suggest to call a monitor color calibration service. Usually it’s not that expensive (compared to buying the tools). Sometimes places like bestbuy also have color calibrator at their place for the TVs.
I use the i1Display and calibrate using third party program Displaycal. But the cheaper colormunki smile is apparently the same hardware. Their more expensive kits only give you more software. But for your needs I imagine you’d be happier with displaycal anyway
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What marcgii said would be my rec, get an xrite i1Display Pro or ColorMunki, main difference being how long the software calibration takes, and use DisplayCal to do it.
Before calibration you should also disable various ‘enhancements’ your monitor might have enabled.
Choose the Office and Web (D65, Gamma 2.2) profile, set the white level to custom 120 or leave at as measured if you don’t want to mess with brightness. Set calibration speed to low (if you have the time), set profile quality to high, and increase the amount of patches used to as high as you have time to spend. After you click on calibrate & profile, you’ll have an interactive screen that will help you set the RGB levels and or brightness hardware settings on your monitor, and when you’re done with that it should be pretty self explanitory. If you’re a gamer, try to run everything borderless since fullscreen will disregard the profile.
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I don’t know if DisplayCAL has this as a choice, but if it does be sure to choose ICC v2 as the profile format for your calibration. Do not choose ICC v4.
Overall question for @Alexander, is there a specific reason you’re asking about this such as photo editing or do you just generally want to get your monitor looking as good as it potentially can? If photo editing is a factor, there’s more to color management than just calibrating your monitor. The software you use, the settings in that software, and the images files you’re working with can all come into play.
This is just for my desktop setup, not for professional use. So I don’t need crazy accuracy, just as good as I can get it.
Ive been getting by on finding reviews online from say tft central and stealing their settings. It gets me close enough then i tweak for my own eye. Its not calibrated but its probably 80% of what i need.