"But lets look at the costs and benefits to the customer and the history of what Jack will prefer me to call proprietary software driving a reference display (PressView, Barco, Sony Artisan). "
Fine reference point actually........ All three strongly positioned quality products that insisted on standing alone "proprietary" in the marketplace. None of them are players now(at least like they were). The modern display companies are all designing to industry standard communication protocals.
As far as the 8 bit issue without trying to stray too much here, it maybe helpful to some viewers to compare this to printer profiling.
"If" you can calibrate to printer (reads "linearize it") before making the profile of said printer, your 8 bit print data (gradients, for example) is less likely to be banded thru the profile transform since there will be less correction work actually needed by the profile itself.
This is where you can compare monitors with downloadable LUTs. This is very similar on the surface to the print profiling example above. Fine tuning the monitor hardware will better "render" you 8 bit display data with less artifacts.
The less work one has to perform on the 8 bit video card the more hands off the data the monitor profile can be. This translates into smoother gradients with the 8 bits you have.
And lastly, the user of the Spyder2, i did find out that there was a brief period where there were specific serial number sequences that didnt talk but only to specific versions of colorvision software. If your spyder2 is 18months(ish) old or newer you should be ok. Off hand I dont recall what serial number lot group those were, my apologies.
Derrick, Integrated Color
