Spyder 3 Elite, good choice ????

Hi All

I am on the Colourconfidence emailing list and have just had notification of a Trade In offer for the Spyer 3 Elite (or Studio). You get £40 off by trading in "your old solution".

Now the question is......I have a Huey that has the blue colour cast problem and it is running towards 8 weeks before Pantone are likely to replace it (w.c. 21st July onwards). It is my understanding 'they' simply send out a new unit i.e. do not require the old one back.

So is it worth me getting the Spyder 3 Elite for £108.99 and simply selling the selling 'new' Huey when I eventually get it. For the record the Huey that are being sent are "designed" to over come the colour cast issue that apparently is more screen related than Huey ~ I was told that the Huey I have would likely work OK on some other monitors.....?

I do want my current monitor to be calibrated (an NEC LCD1530V) and if the Spyder is a good investment for this and any future newer monitor then I could go for it!

TIA for any feedback

I have the III and it does as good a job as my previous EyeOne II's used to do, so I would recommend it. Pete has the Elite. I have the standard, whatever that is called. That is a very good price for the Elite. Calibration is essential.

The Pro is slightly cheaper and still works good too I believe, you just get more control with the elite, like nonstandard settings and specifics to calibrate to.

I only use the Spyder line and I love my 3.

Thanks guys for the feedback.

I have another question? Depending on where I look on the website it says min. Win spec is Win XP but elsewhere Win2k

Now I run Win2K, so anyone of you using the most current version of the software under Win2K

I have Spyder 3 Elite - monitor calibration is fine - Printer calibration is aweful. I have called customer service 3 times - They tell me it is "elevated to Tech Support 2 level" and someone will call me back. Started this game 5 days ago - three calls to them and not a single call back. today it was disclosed that the actual support is outsources and if it is anything more than "is it plugged in" it goes to level two - either there are too many people having problems or they do not have anybody that can help trouble shoot

Item will be returned............

Redfish wrote in post #5930591
I have Spyder 3 Elite - monitor calibration is fine - Printer calibration is aweful. I have called customer service 3 times - They tell me it is "elevated to Tech Support 2 level" and someone will call me back. Started this game 5 days ago - three calls to them and not a single call back. today it was disclosed that the actual support is outsources and if it is anything more than "is it plugged in" it goes to level two - either there are too many people having problems or they do not have anybody that can help trouble shoot

Item will be returned............

My Spyder 3 Elite didn't come with a printer calibration section... So I'm not sure about how you did yours.

I found the monitor calibration to be good. The "amibent light" part of it doesn't work too well for me, but without that, I get good colours from the product..

Yeah, the 3 Elite isn't meant to calibrate your printer AFAIC You do that with the right paper, paper profile, driver selections and fiddling in PS. I did mine but took a while to figure and still couldn't tell you how I did it. But don't blame the SW for something it isn't supposed to do anyway. I use Ilford Galerie and installed the paper profile from Ilford and followed the instructions.

I bought Spyder3 Elite today and am really disappointed with the results. My Samsung 275T monitor has greenish tinge every time I calibrate it.

I can get better results doing it by eye. One porblem is that Spyder asks you to adjust the 3 RGB sliders to adjust colour- the Samsung has 6 sliders (RGB + cyan, magenta & yellow) for both Saturation and Hue (i.e. 12 sliders).

No matter how you adjust them, you can't get them to match Spyder's recommendation.

I googled the problem on the web and see that someone else had the same problem (no solutions offered though). Should have done that before I wasted my money.

I ended up uninstalling it and going back to manual adjustments. Have emailed Spyder and will see what they say.

Very, very disappointing.

Try just telling Spyder that you don't have an adjustment controls - you may well get a better result out of it.

Pete wrote in post #5941765
Try just telling Spyder that you don't have an adjustment controls - you may well get a better result out of it.

done that, it still has a greenish tinge to it - even a Word doc blank page comes out slightly green. Horrid

Whitlam wrote in post #5941788
done that, it still has a greenish tinge to it - even a Word doc blank page comes out slightly green. Horrid

Maybe a slightly dirty screen or sensor?

Is the sensor firmly against the screen when it's scanning?

yes, it is firmly against the screen. Works perfectly on my Toshiba laptop - not on the Samsung. The screen is very clean (less than 2 months old) and the Spyder is less than 1 day old.

Top pic is after calibration (done at least 20 + times today - both basic & advanced modes), the bottom one is before calibration.

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Interesting problem in that it makes me think of the Huey colour cast and the feedback I had about the 'fact' (?) that some monitors will have a colour cast using the 'faulty' Huey & others will not.

I have had a response from ColourConfidence and the software will run under W2K and though they did not apparently have my screen in their database they said it will calibrate other than it may have a limited colour gamut for colour correction [compared to (more modern?) LCD monitors]. At the time I bought it it was deemed to be the best and compared then to the Phillips model but about £50 cheaper. It has served me well and yes I want a larger one sometime soonish.



PS Have you been using Adobe Gamma??? If so, and possibly stating what you know already, you have to disable it by removing the Gamma Loader from the startup folder.

I see on Datacolor's website forum a few people complaining about green tinges after using Spyder3. Mine does seem worse than most though.