My point is near the end but I want to give you my back story if you are interested, or you can just skip to the end...
I've been wanting to get a Passport for a while now, but I haven't because you have to shoot the checker for every lighting condition (and change) you shoot in and then create a profile. This is time consuming, inconvenient, and ends up with tons of profiles under camera calibration.
DataColor recently released a SpyderCheckr product that they claim does not require shooting in different lighting and you can take one reference shot in good lighting, create a profile, and use that for all images from that body. They also claim to use "Preset" functionality instead of calibration, they claim this offers 25 different controls over the 6 available with Camera Profiles. I had a hard time believing this because if it was possible X-Rite would do it. After all they are the de-facto standard for color charts.
I then contacted X-Rite about this and asked if they thought it was possible and get more information about it. They of course didn't know much about the other product but confirmed their product needs a profile for each condition.
I will do anything I can that is passive that will give me more accurate color, and I would love to have a profile that is "perfect" for my body.
I don't own a Passport but the software is free to download from their site and I own a MiniColor checker. I started creating profiles for different conditions, I started outdoors, and created an indoors with flash & ambient and started to notice something. (By the way, I only shoot RAW 18MP on the 7D) There was no real visible difference between the profiles. I do see my histogram move a tiny bit, but visually the images look exactly the same. So I started using a profile I shot for all my images and just apply it as the default in LR3.
I did notice something else though, prior to this I was using Adobe Standard profile, I found the Camera Standard and other profiles made all the colors look funky and unrealistic. Adobe Standard always seemed to feel more like what I saw. In some cases Camera Standard was very harsh to the colors, and in some cases Adobe Standard was as well, but I found Camera Standard was always "off".
I have one particular image of some pumpkins I shot that looked very saturated and were unrealistic with Adobe Standard. They looked more red than orange. Camera Standard was similar but brighter. The Passport profile seemed to nail it, or at least seemed realistic. This was the most extreme color difference I have seen so far when fiddling with profiles. When I do play around with them I notice Adobe Standard is typically pretty close to the Passport profile and some images there is a larger difference.
Right now I default to the Passport calibration for this body, but I need to re-shoot it in a studio setting so the profile is as perfect as possible. The one I am using now is indoors using 580EX II flash and ambient.
The SpyderCheckr really seems interesting that it uses presets and it makes sense they would in fact be more accurate, but I don't have a lot of trust for DataColor as I believe the SpyderCheckr and SpyderLensCals are just cheap knock offs of other products although the SpyderCheckr is more expensive than the Passport. I own the SpyderLensCal and it is kind of cheesy and nothing like the LensAlign. Especially since LensAlign Lite has been updated and is quite impressive. I regret getting the LensCal and have not yet successfully used it to calibrate a lens and wish I got the LensAlign instead.
If anyone has used the SpyderCheckr I would love to hear your feedback on it, especially if you have used the Passport as well.
Anyway, the gist of it, I looks like you can use the Passport to make one profile and use it for all your images for that body. Scientifically it may not be 100% as accurate as shooting one for every lighting condition, visually I can't really tell any difference.
