I bought a ASUS PG278Q ROG Swift 27 and figured I might as well try to make it look as good as possible. The reviews I read on the ASUS PG278Q all said it comes pretty well calibrated from the factory, but I was impressed with the changes the Spyder4Elite made.

I also had an 5 year old 28" 1080p monitor I think I paid $150 bucks for. I thought it looked fine, but after using the Spyder4Elite on it I was freeking amazed. Can't believe I was staring at that garbage image for 5 years.

I'm new to this color calibration, but found the software and the instructions quite easy to use.

Arrived when it was supposed to and works flawlessly. I highly recommend this device and this seller. Setup and use are a breeze, just follow the on screen directions and the results are amazing, Of the 3 laptops I used the Spyder, one I thought had a fairly accurate image was made brighter, sharper, and the colors more vibrant. The other 2 laptops had their screens corrected a lot. Now not only do all three laptops produce great images but they also match each other to a very high degree.

I picked up both the ColorMunki Display and the Spyder4Elite to do a head-to-head test. I am not a professional photographer or anything, but I was unable to get my two monitors to have a consistent appearance (a Dell 27" and Monoprice 27" running off Display Port through Mac OS X 10.10.1), and I figured $160-200 was a fair amount of money to spend to get properly calibrated monitors.

I'd say overall I'd go with the ColorMunki. ColorMunki's software was fairly buggy, but once I got it installed it worked well, and I was happy with the look of my two monitors. I like that ColorMunki's calibration is stored as a normal .icc file in Mac OS X, which means I can save several iterations of it and just change them when my ambient light changes. Spyder4Elite, on the other hand, only lets me have 1 calibration at a time, and if I switch to another one the Spyder4 calibration disappears (I figured how to retrieve it, but I didn't like that kind of restriction).

Both are very similar in terms of hardware and functionality. Both had my adjust my brightness settings, Spyder4Elite had an extra step relating to my monitor's color settings, but at the end of the day I thought the ColorMunki calibration was more natural and realistic.

I'm giving Spyder4Elite 4 stars as it is a quality product that does what it is supposed to do. If people are trying to decide between the two, though, I'd recommend ColorMunki because it is cheaper and a better value.

I calibrated 2 screens using Spyder 4 colorimeter and datacolor provided software, then I did something I won't do normally: I returned everything!

First I calibrated my high gamut ASUS PA279Q 27" set in standard mode, result was rather good which means that calibration removed a slight green cast and whites were neutral maybe slightly on the warm side (expected). Profiling result was quite good too when in Photoshop, correcting the wide gamut over saturation. To be honest though, the ASUS provided factory profile was OK too besides the minimal green cast (which I could have corrected by hand).

So encouraged by this first result, not spectacular but at least showing some progress, I then calibrated my Surface Pro first generation (Samsung?) display. To put this in context one can download a couple profiles for the Surface Pro from the Internet made with the X-Rite instrument which are just fine. So what was my surprise when my screen looked like being transported on the Planet Mars when using the Spyder 4. I tried all the spectral profiles provided by Datacolor for LED screen technologies... with the same horrible result: a strong and totally unacceptable red cast.

I then installed Argyll software with DispCalGUI to see if there was any improvement. To my surprise (again) the results were very similar (reddish). This proves in my opinion the Spyder 4 is very consistent but not capable of dealing accurately with some screens color spectrum. It was also apparent in DispCal GUI that the red channel - when doing the white point - was measured as very dark explaining the subsequent red boost in the calibration LUT curves.

OK so maybe I got a defective instrument or maybe I made a mistake. Or maybe the technology of Spyder 4 needs some refreshing. One of the reasons I bought Spyder 4 was the 7 filters that are advertised. After looking further, I read their patent and realized that they use edge filters with multiple sensors, so it not a direct measure. Maybe the reconstruction of the CIE filter curves is not so good with production units, maybe the provided profiles are outdated. I don't know really what is going on but no one should have to guess or go though such complications!

I recently bought a matching Dell U2414M monitor (same rev00 as well) for one I had already owned for a year. I do photo editing, and as the idiom goes, "a person with a clock always knows what time it is; a person with two clocks is never sure." So I wanted the monitors to be calibrated to match each other. I tried doing it myself with the graphics card tools and monitor settings, but couldnt quite get the colors right across the gamut.

Bought this hoping it would cure my ills, but even using the supposed longer and more accurate grayscale calibration, there is a completely different color cast between the two monitors, the blue saturation and white balance aren't really all that close. You'd expect a calibration tool to correct for something completely obvious to the eye, but it doesnt.

The software and the tool itself are simple and very nice to use, so for a single monitor, its probably fantastic, but it looks like I'm still stuck with two clocks.