Is it worth calibrating a laptop screen/monitor

JohnB47

I'm soon going to receive a film/slide scanner as a present and I'll be spending the rest of my life scanning my collection of old photos.

In anticipation, I have been reading a bit about the scanning process and one website said that it's essential to calibrate your screen/monitor.

I've been looking at images for years on my various laptops and never thought of calibrating any of them.

So my question is - is it worth it? Will I notice any difference? Do I do it once, or regularly?

Also, if anyone has any good sites or forums that talk about film scanning, I'd be very interested (I've already found some good tutorials on youtube but I'd be interested in discussion forums).

My current laptop is a Windows 10 Toshiba L50-C-XP

Thanks.

System

For colour accuracy absolutely however if you've got a cheap monitor with a low static contrast ratio no amount of calibrating can compensate for that and colours will still look washed out in comparison with better panels. Unless you're running a MacBook Pro with a Retina display which has excellent accuracy out of the box or one of the high end Windows laptops with a decent screen you can get calibrated its unlikely that you'd be able to get it calibrated that accurately enough. Your laptop screen has reasonable colour accuracy - reviews suggest a delta error of 4 which puts it at the better end of laptop screens, I can't however find the contrast ratio for your panel. Its certainly not completely useless for what you're wanting to do but it is possible to do better however as to whether its worth spending money on that, it depends on what level you want to achieve.

For those who are doing a lot of photo, video and graphics work to a high hobby or professional standard it is worth it HOWEVER.....

I had my OLED TV professionally calibrated and it cost £300 so if you're going to be paying someone its not cheap. There are currently PC monitors that are calibrated to very high accuracy with Delta errors well below the level of perception of the human eye that are about the same price to buy as a calibration which would be suitable for what you're doing out of the box. Dell U series would be my recommendation, a Dell U2415, a 24" one, is around £215 mark on Amazon, the Dell U2715h, a 27" monitor, is £550-ish.

I will make this point though. No amount of calibration of the monitor and use of colour profiles of monitors and printers in Windows will guarantee that what you see on the screen is what comes out of the printer, especially as even the media printed on has its own effect on the colour. My wife used to work in this field, the printers she used were £15,000 and used solvent based inks, not water based like consumer grade, but even then at the side of her desk were print outs on various materials they printed on of 256 colours with the colour number on them as well so they knew that if they selected a specific colour in Adobe or Corel what it would look like when it was printed.

EveryWhere

http://www.toshiba.co.uk/discontinued-products/satellite-l50-c-1xp/

A low resolution TN screen. Why not add a second hand IPS monitor and calibrate that?

System

EveryWhere wrote: »

A low resolution TN screen. Why not add a second hand IPS monitor and calibrate that?

For the price of a new Dell U2715 you're better off buying one of those new and not having to worry about calibrating it. You'll spend £180 on an X-Rite i1DisplayPro meter alone.

JohnB47

Thanks everyone.

I'm unlikely to be printing my images - more a case of digitising them for viewing on a screen or tablet.

Not sure if I really want to buy another monitor, second hand or no.

EveryWhere

Tarambor wrote: »

For the price of a new Dell U2715 you're better off buying one of those new and not having to worry about calibrating it. You'll spend £180 on an X-Rite i1DisplayPro meter alone.

I guessed the OP is referring to a colour profile for his particular laptop and is not thinking about purchasing calibration equipment.
The problem with the laptop screen apart from anything else is the low resolution. Most phone a tablets are capable of much higher detail. Therefore a suggestion for an inexpensive, but higher quality monitor and if necessary apply the appropriate colour profile.

But if the OP doesn't want to spend, he can search for an appropriate ICC/ICM profile for his device.

JohnB47

I was thinking of using something like this:

https://quickgamma.de/indexen.html

Perhaps it would not make much difference, or be of any use at all, with my low res screen.

Just wondering.

that

another way to think, is what you scan is is the second most original and the purest copy it will probably ever be. Keep that image and work on a copy

wongataa

Tarambor wrote: »

For the price of a new Dell U2715 you're better off buying one of those new and not having to worry about calibrating it. You'll spend £180 on an X-Rite i1DisplayPro meter alone.

All screens will need periodic re-calibrating if you care about colour accuracy.

Biggus_Dickus

Tarambor wrote: »

For colour accuracy absolutely however if you've got a cheap monitor with a low static contrast ratio no amount of calibrating can compensate for that and colours will still look washed out in comparison with better panels. Unless you're running a MacBook Pro with a Retina display which has excellent accuracy out of the box or one of the high end Windows laptops with a decent screen you can get calibrated its unlikely that you'd be able to get it calibrated that accurately enough. Your laptop screen has reasonable colour accuracy - reviews suggest a delta error of 4 which puts it at the better end of laptop screens, I can't however find the contrast ratio for your panel. Its certainly not completely useless for what you're wanting to do but it is possible to do better however as to whether its worth spending money on that, it depends on what level you want to achieve.

For those who are doing a lot of photo, video and graphics work to a high hobby or professional standard it is worth it HOWEVER.....

I had my OLED TV professionally calibrated and it cost £300 so if you're going to be paying someone its not cheap. There are currently PC monitors that are calibrated to very high accuracy with Delta errors well below the level of perception of the human eye that are about the same price to buy as a calibration which would be suitable for what you're doing out of the box. Dell U series would be my recommendation, a Dell U2415, a 24" one, is around £215 mark on Amazon, the Dell U2715h, a 27" monitor, is £550-ish.

I will make this point though. No amount of calibration of the monitor and use of colour profiles of monitors and printers in Windows will guarantee that what you see on the screen is what comes out of the printer, especially as even the media printed on has its own effect on the colour. My wife used to work in this field, the printers she used were £15,000 and used solvent based inks, not water based like consumer grade, but even then at the side of her desk were print outs on various materials they printed on of 256 colours with the colour number on them as well so they knew that if they selected a specific colour in Adobe or Corel what it would look like when it was printed.

Just curious,... but what does a professional calibrator actually do to the TV?...do they tweak the TV settings or do they have access to internal TV settings that are not normally accessible to the user,...or something like that?

that

Biggus_Dickus wrote: »

Just curious,... but what does a professional calibrator actually do to the TV?...do they tweak the TV settings or do they have access to internal TV settings that are not normally accessible to the user,...or something like that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1PCG5hXUmE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbMshsiiiFM