Well, I got the NEC2690 but kept getting a "Cannot communicate with the monitor" error message whenever I tried to calibrate using SpectraView II. The NEC tech rep was at a loss to find a fix. He finally suggested I try downloading the "Special Edition" of Spectraview II, developed specifically for use with the "dual-link" Mini-DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter. When I told him I was using the "single-link" adapter (since NEC had told me there were no issues with it) he simply said "well maybe the Special Edition will fix your problem." It seems there are some remaining bugs with the single-link adapter when used in combination with certain video cards (mine is the Nvidia GeForce GT130) and NEC clearly doesn't have a total grasp of the situation. For now, I'm using the following work around...
I can calibrate the monitor using either my MBP (with a DVI port) or my old iMac (with a mini-DVI port); SpectraView II can communicate with the NEC2690 from either of these machines with no problems. Since the calibration is internal to the NEC2690, I simply need to transfer the icc profile generated by SpectraView II to my new iMac. Not an ideal situation, to be sure, but it works.
NEC acknowledges there were known issues with the single-link Mini-DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter on Macs running under 10.5.6, and their website says the problem was corrected with the release of 10.5.7. But, as I said above, there seems to be a few remaining, albeit isolated, situations where the single-link adapter interferes with the communication between SpectraView II and the monitor. Based on the earlier comment by a NEC tech rep (see my first post), I'd guess this problem affects about 15% of the Macs with a mini-DisplayPort. I'm running OS 10.5.8 and am not planning to switch to 10.6 in the foreseeable future; I expect I'll make the change somewhere around 10.6.3. I hope that release will fix this problem and allow me to calibrate the NEC2690 directly from my iMac.
