I need to buy a monitor calibrator for my 17" inch Sony Trinitron (CPD-220VS) CRT monitor. Can anyone with Black & White experience point me in the right direction? I know that the Spyder, Monaco, and Eye-One are highly recommended for color work, but black and white photography is ignored or barely mentioned in all the discussions and I've read so far. I will be doing (almost exclusively) film-based black and white photography and infrared photography (also in B&W). I intend to scan in the negatives, manipulate/clean them up in Photoshop, and then have them printed by a reputable printing service. When I can afford to buy a printer I will do my own prints. B&W is a different beast where gradient greyscale tones/textures are everything, so I'm wondering if the software I need is different. I'm using an Apple Mac Pro 2.66 Ghz and would prefer software that plays nice with it.
If I'm not mistaken, color is more about the white point calibration and black and white is more about the black point. Am I right? I've read that current LCD's, at least the ones under $1000, don't produce true blacks. I can't afford an expensive monitor right now. Maybe next year.
My Trinitron appears to be in good working condition. I've been using it every day this past month for at least 2 hours day (average: 4 to 6 hours) without incident. It had hardly been used for at least five years, maybe as many as seven. In some years it wasn't powered on even once. I'm hoping it is in good enough condition to use with Photoshop once it's been calibrated. I have a portfolio of professional prints from my college days that I'd like to make new prints of in addition to my new work.
I'd like to believe that my Sony has enough life left in it to hold me over until LCD's have improved and come down in price. Or can that black point limitation be mentally adjusted for through experience? If the Sony *can* be calibrated, I would buy a cheap 19 or 20 inch widescreen for everything else I do (web, word processing, etc) plus use it with Photoshop for cleaning/touching up the image and for initial tweaking of the image and then use the Trinitron for final adjustments. I have not tried this workflow yet, so I'm guessing at how well it will work for me. I should have CS3 and the scanner within the next few weeks.
- Smokeless
