Best free calibration tool or website?

[TickleMyElmo]

Finally bought the Dell Alienware AW3418DW and now I'm wanting to get the best calibration out of it. If anyone knows a website that I can use to calibrate it with or a cheap or free tool please let me know. Thanks.
Thinking of getting the Spyder but I'll have to save up for that since I am now broke.

 

[Janus67]

Does it not already come calibrated? Most high end Dell panels are already done so (ultrasharps etc)

 

[TickleMyElmo]

Not sure as I can't compare it to anything.

 

[EarthDog]

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-calibrate-your-monitor/

Does whatever you do require the purchase of a $150+ tool to calibrate the thing perfectly?

 

[UltraTaco]

Well if you don't know if it's calibrated or not, do you really need to do it? As in, will you see the difference?

 

[TickleMyElmo]

Guess not.. I'm just a perfectionist

 

[UltraTaco]

I just looked it up! That's sick!:

View attachment 197881

 

[mackerel]

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

Found above site to be helpful when checking out LCDs. Not sure how much you can adjust on a laptop display compared to desktop display, but you can at least tinker with the levels/gamma/etc in driver settings to get your blacks black, whites white, and everything else roughly in balance.

Not substitute for using a hardware calibration device though, they will help you get your colours closer to standard, but unless you're doing colour sensitive work, it is possibly overkill to go that far.

 

[UltraTaco]

Not substitute for using a hardware calibration device though, they will help you get your colours closer to standard, but unless you're doing colour sensitive work, it is possibly overkill to go that far.

>p e r f e c t i o n i s t<
You don't understand until you become one, sir.

 

[Mpegger]

>p e r f e c t i o n i s t<
You don't understand until you become one, sir.

I wouldn't say it's perfectionism. Comparing a calibrated monitor (even a cheap TN) to the same uncalibrated monitor could be a eye opener...

Seriously though, some monitors that are uncalibrated have terrible colors and contrast compared to a calibrated twin, and the difference could be night and day, even if you aren't doing color sensitive work and just watch videos all day long. Of course, this does mean having to get your hands on a colorimeter, but the cheap ones are more then adequate for calibrating, along with software such as DisplayCAL to do the calibration.

 

[mackerel]

Maybe it is just me, I find I can quickly get "good enough" on most monitors just by adjusting brightness and contrast, both of which are often turned up rather high by default. Colour can be set to subjectively good enough.

 

[EarthDog]

Maybe it is just me, I find I can quickly get "good enough" on most monitors just by adjusting brightness and contrast, both of which are often turned up rather high by default. Colour can be set to subjectively good enough.

I'm with you there. What I can seem to eyeball with links multiple people provided, I can get it 'close enough'. My former employer had one of those tools and with how I set things, 'perfect' wasn't far off and hardly noticeable. YMMV of course.

 

[mackerel]

Further thought, I have to imagine that monitors, and even smartphones, are kinda pushed a bit beyond what you might actually use them in the same way TV sets have been. The claim is that they all try to out-do each other in the showroom, thus the manufacturers tweak it up some more to try and make it look better against others, ignoring that people start looking like they were swimming in fake tan. More recently, with the Google Pixel 2 XL I think, people complained the screen was too dull. Google had set it to "realistic" colours, not the more vivid processing that everyone else does. I think they put in an option to go between the two after that.

As a past hobby I did a lot of photography so I did get an Adobe RGB gamut monitor. When Windows get the colour management wrong, you knew about it! I did run a calibrator on that. Still got it, but it only runs on Win7 and I have to replace device if I want Win10 support.

 

[TickleMyElmo]

It just seems washed out. Too much gamma maybe? Not sure.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Read here: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/dell_alienware_aw3418dw.htm

It's an IPS panel, but no factory calibration. Even with calibration it isn't the most accurate of monitors in terms of color reproduction and gamma consistency.
You can try the settings they list and see if it helps your monitor, but YMMV.

Overall, they're great monitors, though.

 

[Mpegger]

Being a IPS, someone should have profiled it and uploaded a icm for it.

Gamma you can get close enough visually. Plenty of Gamma test images and a couple of websites that will walk you through the steps to set your gamma.

 

[TickleMyElmo]

Can't find an icm for it.

 

[UltraTaco]

Aren't colors meant to be colorful? Nvidia even has a word for it. "Digital vibrance" I crank mine to 70

 

[satrow]

Being a IPS, someone should have profiled it and uploaded a icm for it.

The ALIENWARE_AW3418DW-MONITOR_A00-00_DRVR_VW2HF.exe contains the cat, icm and inf files for it: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/drivers/driversdetails?driverId=VW2HF

 

[Mpegger]

On top of the ICM, I suggest installing DisplayCAL. It has a ICM loader that will actually keep the ICM loaded in most cases. If you game, many times games will override the ICM you may have loaded and revert the monitor back to it's default, non-ICM state. The DisplayCAL loader will prevent that (though there are the occasional games where it will fail to do so). Also, Window's own color management is broken, and will only apply the ICM at startup. After that, if anything changes the color settings, you'll have to go back into the Window color management, and reset the ICM, every single time.