Alpine Climbing

Snake oil? It sort of sounds a bit like it… part with hard earned cash for…

“Calibrate your display–just like professionals. Spyder2express calibrates monitors in three easy steps–simply plug it in, specify your display type, and it does the rest, automatically calibrating your monitor or laptop. Check the before-and-after. You’ll see the improvement!”

I was a tad skeptical.

A couple of friends said good things about it and sure enough I thought the before and after comparison showed a significant improvement. If you’re serious enough about your photos to own digital photo editing software like PhotoShop or LightRoom then this is probably worth your money.

Pros:

• It really does improve your monitor picture. The software allows you to see before and after pictures.
• Its very simple to use and only takes about ten minutes per PC/monitor.
• Not that expensive. Fifty plus bucks isn’t much when you consider the cost of your camera and PC combined.
• This is a home user focused product so it doesn’t ask you a lot of complex questions that only a pro could answer. If you’re a professional then it probably doesn’t have all the features you’d want.

Cons:

• It doesn’t hang in front of the monitor very well. I sort of had to gently hold it in place for the few minutes the calibration software took to run. Turns out you can lean a book against it which saves actually holding it there.
• This only calibrates your monitor not your printer. Systems for printer calibration seem to be a lot more expensive. probably better to take a trial and error approach there with some test printing.
• No support for dual monitors.
• Reading the feedback on Amazon suggests their phone support may not be so great.