I have been using mid/high end Dell Ultrasharp LCDs for years. I like their value. I can tolerate their brightness.
Yeterday I got a new U2713HM, and the first thing I did when I got home was calibrate it with my Colormunki. I also setup my old U24blahblah adjacent in profile (nothing beats two separate displays). I was happy to find that Windows 8, for all its other annoyances, supports dual color profiles for two monitors. Unfortunately, the calibration on the two displays is not very close. The new U27" display is much warmer than the old U24" display, even after I re-calibrated both (on custom color settings). Colormunki software doesn't give you much information, so I turned to open-source HCFR Calibration software. I had used it successfully on an LCD TV a few years back, and figured it might help me see what is going on.
What did I find?
1) According to HCFR, I had a large variance between measurements taken within seconds of one another. Cyan Delta E might jump between .3 and 3. Cyan was the most unstable, but yellow jumped occasionally. Others varied by .2 Delta E, which I figure is okay. This variance made me wary about my colormunki hardware.
2) According to HCFR, My white balance on the gray-scale tests was all over the map, particularly in the darkest blacks. I think this is the attribute that causes the warm look on the new U27.
3) Using HCFR to produce CIE diagrams seemed to show a gamut that wasn't as wide as aRGB, but it seems that HCFR doesn't overlay the color spaces on top of its diagram, so I wasn't able to confirm. It appeared that the green gamut was weaker than the others...though I know that is the color that is always most problematic.
So based on this flaky evidence, I started monkeying with the controls I had at my disposal, focusing on red and cyan to try to tame the difference with my eyes. RGB saturation adjustments were too coarse, and I gave up. I backed off the contrast substantially (molormunki tells you to set it at 100% and then proceed to adjust everything else) because I thought perhaps it was overpowering a color and create a non-linearity that would be tamed by reducing and recalibrating. No luck.
Suggestions? I would rather not have to buy another colorimeter, though I see that the X-rite i1Display Pro would let me do hardware calibration which would gain me more control and probably a resulting wider gamut. Advice about using HCFR? Advice about using Colormunki?
Thanks