LCD Color Corrector?
colorContrast asks: " I've currently got a Viewsonic VG700b, and as of recent, it has been giving me some trouble. Instead of showing real black, i'm now getting a red hue for black, and the pixels on the screen have become more pronounced than they used to be. The odd thing is that when I brought my monitor home over vacation, the problem was fixed for a short while, but now it appears to be broken again. Does anyone have any suggestions on if its time to get a new LCD, or if they know of a fix for this problem? (I have attempted to manually correct it by changing the colors but that did little.)"
Sounds like the exact problem had with an old CTR, it when all green. In the end it turned out to be a shorted cable, if you bent it one way it would go normal again. A new cable fixed that. I bet your A.) are using a 25 pin sub-D cable and B.) its cable (or its plug) has gone bad. The fact that it "got better" for some time may indicate this. Check it out.
Sounds to me like how my screen looks when the VGA cable gets knocked a little out of whack with the video card. It might be a short in the monitor cable as well.
Don't think I've ever seen an LCD panel drift in color unless it was a cabling issue. CRTs, on the other hand, generally either drift to red or green as they die in my experience.
There's lots of software-based gamma/color correction fixes that you can apply to the monitor depending on your OS. The 'advanced' display driver panel should have some color/gamma adjustments if you've got an nVidia or ATI card under Win, and there's a big ass "calibrate" button on your display preference pane on the Mac that'll let you get stuff back in whack.
If you're running any Adobe apps under Win or Mac OS 9, there's the Adobe Gamma control panel -- which I personally used when I had an old CRT that decided to go pink and dark on me.
When you start talking calibration hardware, on the other hand, you're starting to talk about stuff like the Gretag-Macbeth EyeOne series or a Spider, which are probably more pricey than the new LCD you've got your eye on.
Any computer user would be **surprised** the difference is makes to calibrate your monitors (thus creating an ICC profile). It allows you to synchronize your monitors, scanners, printers, etc. It works better with macs, but also works with windows (I'm in the process of making it work with Debian).
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Read more here:
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/monitor_calibr
http://www.chromix.com/ColorGear/Shop/productdeta
and of course:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile
Animoog.org
A hardware calibration device, along with decent software, will make your life much easier. One thing to remember is that you'll have trouble replicating the output of any active display on print. It doesn't matter whether it's CRT or LCD. You have to match the display to the gamut of the printer in order to have a seemless workflow.
Eeeeew. You want to edit photos with that ???