X Rite EODIS2 Eye One Display 2
Friday, February 27th, 2009X Rite EODIS2 Eye One Display 2
Reliable and affordable color starts here. The Eye-One Display 2, the next generation for monitor profiling, is a brand new, easy-to use powerful, solution that provides the best monitor profile quality ever! With enhancements to both hardware and software, you’ll achieve consistent, predictable color on all types of monitors - both LCD and CRT. The newest Eye-One Match 3.0 software’s easy-to-use interface provides an Easy Mode for great results with a few simple clicks, plus an Advanced Mode for experienced users to achieve individual and best possible monitor calibration. Ideal for photographers, creative directors, publishers and designers working in ad agencies and corporations. Easily attaches to both LCD and CRT monitors with built-in counterweight and suction cups Use at multiple workstations - no additional licensing fee Mac and PC compatible - OS X, Windows 98 / 2000 / ME / XP USB powered When you need additional color profiling functionality, use your upgrade voucher included in every Eye-One Display2 package, towards the purchase of any other Eye-One package
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars great product–worth the money.
easy to use and calibrated my Samsung LCD monitor fairly quickly. I would recommend this product!
5 Stars Great for home picture use and scrapbooking
I was becoming frustrated because when I sent my digital photos out to print at my local store I never knew if the color and exposure would turn out correct. I would have to re-edit them and sent them out for print again because my monitor was an unreliable reflection of the printed picture. The X-Rite EODIS2 Eye-one display 2 changed all that. It was really easy to use and my pictures turn out perfect. This device does not calibrate your printer so my pictures still do not look right when printed out on my printer. However, I use my pictures for scrapbooking so it is a must that they do not fade so I have to send them out to be professionally printed (For example: Kodak, Snap Fish, CVS, Walgreens). So for me, it really didn’t matter that my printer was not calibrated with my monitor .
Just remember to install the software before plugging the device or your computer will think it is a storage device and you will have to restore settings to previous date to get the Eye-one to work.
I wish I got the Eye-one years ago it would have saved me a lot of money in re-printed pictures.
4 Stars Excellent results despite clumsy user interface
The Eye-One Display 2 (designed by Gretag-MacBeth and now sold by X-Rite) gets only 4 stars because the user interface is clumsy, but it gets that many stars because it does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It calibrated my photo/graphics quality HP LP2475W monitor so that the photos on the screen matched the photos coming off the printer. I hadn’t been able to do that with an old Spyder calibration device I’d used previously on another monitor. Although there wasn’t a huge difference between the color balance settings I got with the Eye One vs. the Spyder, the Spyder couldn’t set luminance (brightness). The Eye One 2 can do that and it was critical in getting the prints to match the screen.
There are two adjusting modes - an automatic one and an advanced one. The automatic mode is very straightforward to use, but the software did not properly adjust luminance. The “advanced” mode is what you should use. But there’s one issue you need to be aware of. The printed instructions are so brief as to be useless, and the on-screen instructions for the advanced mode are not at all intuitive.
There are three linked modules in the advanced mode, one for adjusting contrast, one for adjusting color/white point and one for adjusting luminance/brightness. You have to page through the directions for each module by clicking on an arrow at the upper right of the program window, and then you start the module by clicking elsewhere, on a “start” arrow on the lower right. Once the module starts you open your monitor controls and adjust contrast to match the bar graph on the screen. Each time you make a small adjustment, it takes the software a few seconds to recalibrate the bar graph, so you need a bit of patience. When you have a match, click on Stop to return to the beginning of the next module. You then read the next set of instructions, one short page at a time, and find the start button to begin the color module. Repeat for the luminance mondule. This is very clumsy. The on-screen instruction should take you from the instructions directly to the first step of the actual calibration routine. When the first module is done, the interfact shoudl take you back to the instructions for the next module without having to jump back & forth between an instruction window, a separate start button, and the adjustment process. (If you start a module without finding the instructions, the software will run in an endless loop while it waits for you to open up your monitor controls and adjust the settings for each stage.)
When the “advanced” calibration process finishes you get a report on screen with a chart showing the color gamut of the monitor as it’s been calibrated. It takes about 20 minutes to complete. You can name and save the monitor settings and set a reminder to recalibrate in a week or a month, etc. (It’s a good idea to recalibrate often as monitors shift their output as they age. In fact that’s the reason why you buy one of these devices for yourself rather than passing it from friend to friend.)
To sum up, the Eye-One Display 2 is a very competent device with a non-intuitive, clumsy user interface for the adavanced mode. Buy it for its competence, not its elegance. The ability to calibrate luminance/brightness is a critically important ingredient and its not available on the less expensive “LT” version of this product.
3 Stars Good but not great
Firstly, this product shipped with basically no documentation on how (and what) SW to install — and no obvious installers to launch upon inserting the CD into your computer. Basically, the critical piece of software you need to install is the “Eye-One Match 3″. Recommend visiting xrite.com to get the latest version of the Match software and install that.
After I got the software all installed, I got started calibrating my Apple Cinema Display monitor - I’m on a Mac OSX computer. The software offers two modes - easy and advanced. Since I know about color, I thought I’d head straight for the advanced mode first. The software itself does provide instructions to walk you through the calibration process, so that was nice to see — given the absence of documentation. After following the on-screen instructions to the letter, my “advanced mode” calibration resulted in a very cold/harsh (heavy on the blues) color profile that was just obviously off. Figuring I had made some mistake, I tried it again — in advanced mode. Same result. Next time I tried the “easy mode” - which produced much better results. The only problem is that you’re stuck with the program’s defaults for gamma, white point, etc. In any case, the easy mode appeared to produce much better results — at least for me. In the end, due to the drastic differences between the easy and advanced mode, and essentially being stuck with the easy mode — I’m rating this product as three stars. Honestly, I think there are better products out there for this kind of cash.
4 Stars Good for non-pro level
This is a fine device for what it is. Using it in “easy” mode couldn’t be, well - easier. And, the difference will likely startle those who haven’t ever calibrated a monitor or laptop before.
But don’t get carried away with references to higher level systems. It’s true that the Blue Eye (which is just a re-branding of NEC’s pro displays) uses this as their measuring device (I’ve got one), but that’s the end of the similarity. The NEC/Blue Eye system is a two-way communication between the measuring device and the electronics in the display. During the calibration, the two devices do a great deal of sophisticated measuring and actual adjustment of the monitor itself, rather than just creating a passive profile for the computer to read. After the process is conmplete, the monitor then makes ongoing adjustments between calibrations to compensate for the inevitable color “drift” that happens on all monitors.
(This is the reason for the reminders to re-calibrate, by the way, and why, if you don’t do it at least monthly (regardless of brand), you’ll have wasted your investment.)
So by all means get one of these and move up a giant step towards “what you see is what you get”, but know that this is a prosumer level device.
By the way, this alone will only make your screen look better (realistic flesh tones, etc.). For printing, you’ll need to learn about and use printing paper profiles. This is part of “color management”, which is a whole topic by itself.
