Others say...

"MUST OWN for design/photo pros"
Works great. Use it on a macbook pro about every month and its needed!
Simply a must own for serious graphics people.


"Maybe It's Just Me, But"
Been using this for about a month now. Overall cannot see any great improvement over using Quick Gamma, which is free, but then again, I've got an inexpensive AOC CRT monitor, and a laptop LCD monitor with the notorious Radeon Mobility card that won't allow external programs to write to it.

Anyway, I've calibrated to all the settings on the menu and also tried to achieve the 2.2 gamma, 5800 color temperature profile suggested with the ambient light option turned on. The latter was not doable with my monitor. I also saved ALL the profiles produced. Bear in mind, each profile was produced using different brightness, contrast, and color temperature settings, all of which were set outside the program, using the control knob on the monitor itself.

Here are a couple of things that were weird for me with respect to the CRT. EVERY ONE of the profiles produced is apparently identical. The screen color or brightness do not change one little bit, no matter which profile is selected as default in the windoze xp pro display properties color management menu. Nor is there one bit of difference among them within Picture Window Pro color management, as each is selected in turn as the monitor profile Second, the so-called before-and-after display at the end of the calibration process is a joke. The before picture does not resemble my display prior to running the program at all, and this before picture is identical after each calibration, no matter what the prior settings were.

On the LCD, there is no difference between the before and the after picture, which I chalk up to the stubbornness built into the Radeon Mobility card, nor is there a bit of difference among the profiles, built under differing parameters as with the CRT, in Picture Window Pro color management, though they all produce a different, but identical, set of colors and brightness levels than produced by the profiles from other hardware manufacturers.

So, as stated, maybe it's just me. Or, maybe it's a function of how little my monitor cost, though it produces great colors for me, as I will address next. But, I'm not quite convinced that Spyder2Pro was really worth it for me.

Fortunately, I bought the suite that includes PrintFixPro 2.0. Now that program is a whole 'nother story. My old (ancient by computer time) Epson Stylus Color 1520 and its little sibling, the 600, print what I see on the screen all the time now. Even the black and white comes out right, after adding the extended gray measurements to the printer profiles produced.

Conclusion: for me Spyder2Pro seems a bit of a joke, because I can calibrate by eye, with a little help from Quick Gamma, and produce as good a picture; PrintFixPro 2.0 is great. A little tedious, printing, drying, and reading the patches, but the result is worth it. Sort of wish I'd bought it as a standalone, but then its being bundled with the Spyder only cost about $100 more. Someday, I might have a monitor where the Spyder will do more good. As it is, what I see is what is printed, and that's what I was after, Spyder or no.

[...]

"Spyder2PRO not clear"
We purchased the Spyder2PRO after reviewing the information on Colovision's website. Because of a delay in loading the program, the return timeframe from the 3rd party supplier had already passed. When we loaded it, we found out that it was incomplete. We had not received all we THOUGHT we were getting. We really needed PrintFix PRO suite. I take responsibility for loading it late, and not being able to return it. When I called Colorvision, they were very helpful, and for an additional several hundred dollars, supplied what I needed.
I think Spyder2PRO needs to supply more accurate information to their retailers and to their customer relations people. We find the product to be helpful rather easy to use.

"Does what it says on the box"
I upgraded from the Spyder2Express, not really an upgrade because its cheaper to just purchase the pro version than it is to get the upgrade, which means I ended up with a spare device.

On my mac the dual screen supports just works, I use a single card with two outputs and it does support two profiles at the same time. Worked first time, but Mac dual screen support is much better than Windows.
I also calibrated my Windows systems and my laptop with no issues.

Makes the complex task of calibrating your screens pretty simple.

One point to highlight before you start though and this applies to ANY product of this type.
You simply MUST try to learn what you are attempting to do BEFORE starting any calibration process. If you do not know what the device is trying to do, then you will have problems. Color management is a complex process, expecting this device to simplify it while ignoring all the other aspects of a color managed workflow is a recipe for failure.

This applies to Gretag and the others as well.


"The Spyder2Pro works fine. It's about those directions."
This product is easy to use. Why are the directions so difficult to wade through? I ended up calling customer service, after reading the printed material and searching the CD materials. The major hangup was getting past the little popup window inside the folder with the product icon: When you open it, a popup asks for your name, the serial number and your phone number, as I recall. I thought this was the product registration page, which I postponed doing to continue my search for the directions. Had I filled in the registration material and hit "continue," I'd have finished calibrating my monitor and hour and a half sooner. The customer service rep said, "Yeah, you have to sort of put two and two together." A simple note on the registration page saying: "Do this first or we'll never let you get to our directions" would have been very helpful. Overall, the printed directions need work. By the way, the product is great. At last, my prints look like what's on my monitor.