A week ago, I received my HP LP2475w monitor for use (almost exclusively) for image processing. After spending many hours trying go get a "proper and good" profile, I am finally happy that the monitor is a very good choice for my work. Colour is excellent with no hue shift across the screen (within my personal and limited ability to finely judge colours), intensity variations are minimal, and brightness is "exactly right" for my working conditions. Here are some notes on the experiences.
My monitor and print profile system is the i1 and use the Eye-One Match 3 software for calibration. I followed the i1 recommendations of Gamma 2.2 and set the screen contrast to 100%.
The monitor was excessively bright. I lowered the monitor brightness to zero with the OSD this makes it acceptably bright without glare. When calibrating/profiling the monitor, I could not properly adjust the blue channel with the OSD to make the software bar graph balance to zero. Any alterations of the blue channel over 236 would have NO effect on the profile operation - and, it seems, I could not generate a good profile/calibration because of this limitation.
To solve the problem, I increased the brightness in the OSD to a value of 8. This would allow all three RGB channels to properly calibrate with the i1. It seems that, for my monitor, any value 7 and over would allow proper calibration. However, this made the monitor slightly bright for my eyes - but very acceptable. In addition, I reprofiled my Epson 4800 for use with Costco 8.5x11 paper for testing purposes. When prints were compared with the Photoshop Soft Proof screen, they were close but the screen was a bit brighter. The monitor OSD settings for this were:
Brightness = 8
Contrast = 100
Red = 232
Green = 216
Blue = 230
To get around the slightly overbright display (I could not set to brightness down to zero without having calibration problems with the Blue channel), I chose to profile/calibrate the monitor with an OSD contrast set to 80. This is against the recommendation of the Match 3 to set the contrast to 100%. However, when this profile was generated, everything fell into place perfectly. The Match 3 contrast indication was perfectly on zero implying that the monitor still achieved a 2.2 gamma. Brightness was exactly correct for my eyes/working conditions. When viewing a test print on the Costco paper and comparing it with the Soft Proof in PS, the soft proof (set to a rendering intent of Perceptual, Black point compensation on, simulate paper colour off) "perfectly" matches the print. In other words, I can rely on the soft proof to accurately represent the print.
Reducing the monitor contrast to 80 also had the effect of making the illumination almost perfect and uniform. The final monitor OSD settings for this were:
Brightness = 8
Contrast = 80
Red = 235
Green = 216
Blue = 226
In the final analysis, the HP 2475w monitor profiles extremely well, has uniform colour with minimal intensity variation, and works as a very fine device for image processing. The only things needed were to dramatically reduce the monitor brightness and somewhat reduce the contrast settings in the monitor's OSD.
Browsing the internet is really perfect - all colour and contrast are spot-on when using a colour management aware browser like Firefox.