thanks Tony. Yea, I've had a NEC Spectrview for a while 26WUXI. But even though I've read much on the subject I am by no means an expert. Especially as things change. Im using the new photo viewer on a brand new machine. I tried v2 and v4 profiles and see no difference. As you say, its not color managed.
Yes if you want to stay with Windows software you will need to reinstate the older Windows Photo Viewer as stated earlier and you would also need to use V2 profiles not the default X-Rite V4. You may also want to investigate the other free offers by third parties and see which you prefer. In that case I do not know what flavour of ICC supported but perhaps the safe route is V2
But I dont understand the application of the internal lut settings. If they reside inside the monitor, why does the system need to be color managed to make the profile corrections appear on the screen? Probably a dumb question but why isnt all output to the monitor adjusted by the internal LUT?
Certainly not a dumb question. Colour aware applications such as Lightroom and Photoshop rely on an accurate description of the monitors state at any given time to allow the display of 'correct' colour. An accurate monitor profile describes the monitors condition and allows LR and PS to alter the image display to account for irregularities described in the profile against our required standards. Therefore should the monitor display be a little too yellow the application (PS) can correct for this to display the image with adjusted colour to reflect the image data with more accuracy.
The advantages of hardware calibration are really high precision and good gradation. For a little more in depth explanation of LUT's and colour depth
http://nativedigital.co.uk/site/2015/02/luts-and-luts-of-bits-look-up-tables-and-monitor-colour-depth-explained/Since the hardware/software combination is dealing directly with the internals of the monitor you do not have the loss of gradations that you would have with a software only method. Further the calibration being fully automatic the precision remains higher than variations introduced by each adjustment in software calibration. The bottom line being that hardware calibration should allow us to achieve more accurate profiles by adjusting the monitors electronics internally to our required standards than the software only method.
You cannot calibrate your device to sRGB, Adobe RGB etc. these are synthetic spaces that do not describe real world devices such as monitors and printers. sRGB perhaps comes the closest to describing a device but that device based on a theoretical CRT display using a particular phosphor, therefore still a synthetic space. Adobe RGB being a fortunate error in transcribing SMPTE information incorrectly, but having realised this the colour space found to be worthwhile
Our monitors have their own colour space with their own gamut limitations usually described by the manufacturer as 97% sRGB, 99.8% Adobe RGB, etc.
What we are aiming at with the calibration and profiling steps is to set our monitor to a known condition and characterise how closely our monitor matches those conditions. This characterisation is our monitor profile and will accurately describe how our monitor really displays colour vs the required conditions. Having this information a colour savvy application such as LR or PS is able to alter the image appearance to match the true values of our image data. That is if the display is say a little too yellow from the White point aims the application will adjust the image display internally to get as close as possible.