Now I'm not entirely sure how the old 90 series did it but it seems like the 3D Lut means that the PA series can be calibrated using few data points.
For instance you can bring up multiprofiler and go into custom mode edit and then using SVII measure the primaries and white point and then you are set. Just dial in chromaticity coordinates in MP until the SVII patch reading for the primary matches reference, do the same for white balance and then just tell it what gamma you want and what brightness and you are set. The 3D Lut handles the interplay of everything at once and from those simple inputs (plus a few factory values) delivers the proper secondaries with proper luminances and the entire gray-scale and everything else.
Seriously in literally just two minutes I got the below (see next post) results for sRGB primary and gamma 2.2 (for blu-ray/TV) mode in multiprofiler.
I managed to use an i1Pro for this so I could get some sort of extra sanity check and see how the results read out and be able to look at how saturation tracks too, etc.
reference is:
R .640,.330
G .300,.600
B .150,.060
W .3127,.3290
to get a little closer to that (according to i1pro at least) I entered for the coordinates:
R .640,.333 (read back as .640,.300)
G .300,.596 (read back as .300,.600)
B .150,.056 (read back as .152 there is no way to get it better the display doesn't quite make .150 no matter what,.060)
W .319,.332
you can see that the i1pro didn't suggest much change other than for Wx, Gy and By and even then only Wx was more than .005 change
for reference when I used the NEC puck I had to enter:
R .642,.333
G .300,.597
B .150,.056
W .319,.334
so you can see that the i1Pro and the NEC puck (USED IN SVII only, outside of SVII it reads WAYYYY differently than the i1Pro or DTP94b pucks) were in remarkable agreement, and aside from WB both were in reasonably close agreement with factory settings.
I think it is pretty clear that NEC really does apply a custom calibration to the i1D2 NEC puck and also provides highly customized tables for each of their displays for it since an off the shelf puck has something like an average 8dE and up to 18dE copy to copy variation according to one study and it seems like considering that it would be quite unusual that my NEC puck and i1Pro would be so close if they didn't custom calib each hardware unit plus provide a table for each monitor on top.
The NEC puck and the i1Pro actually provided more closely matching results both reading the primaries one monitor than the NEC puck reading the sRGB primaries of two different NEC PA241W monitors. Are the factory presets any better than the puck readings then??? perhaps, but I wonder a little now. Not sure about the native primary readings, maybe different there.
Of course keep in mind even with compensation on from spot to spot there will be some variation across the screen and all the measuring units have some error and so on so none of this is to the nth decimal point in reality. So the reality that things are never nearly so close as we think we ahve gotten them with out calibrations and charts and going for every little detail.
I definitely do see metamerism issue comparing wide gamut to sRGB displays though, they simply don't look the same. To my eye the wide gamuts with no correction actually appear to match real life (suing a color check chart) a little bit better, but who knows. Using the metamerism toggle makes white and quite a few shades look more similar between the two display types (while making certain other shades seem even more off) but they still don't look the same.
It is a tricky issue and a little troubling since it seems like images edited on a wide gamut in regular mode won't quite look the same if you switch to an sRGB-gamut monitor, at least for some people and possibly the degree of difference varies a lot from person to person. A tricky business.
In some ways I wonder if it not the sRGB gamuts that are more troubled though since I could swear that a real-life CC chart more closely matched the look on the wide gamut although it didn't exactly look the same in either case.
I wonder what a reference CRT looks more like, a wide gamut CCFL LCD, wide gamut+metamerism toggle CCFL LCD, CCFL sRGB LCD, LED sRGB LCD or RGB LED sRGB LCD? hah.
Some say the whole tri-stim color management system is basically a failure when it comes to getting different display technologies to deliver identical looking results to the eye.
Oddly the srGB monitor calib with DTP looked closer to the NEC+i1orNEC puck+metamerism than the i1pro used on both and the i1pro sRGB seemed perhaps even a bit farther away from a real life color checker chart comparison. (The NEC puck on the sRGB monitor using third party software made an awful looking calibration it made it look really red it sort of did what the i1pro did compared to the dtp only did that about 100x as much) Probably need a 1nm $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ spectro to get a better clue, I think some display types can have very spiky spectrums that might throw off some colorimeters and even a 10nm resolution i1Pro.