Friday, January 26, 2018

Color Calibration of Printers

My wife wants a better match of colors on screen and on the color printer, and she is not being unreasonable.  I read about calibrating the monitor and do not want to spend money on a colorimeter.  There is a builtin color calibration tool in Windows 7, but the ViewSonic VP201b monitor on her computer will not allow me into the brightness/contrast menu.  (The 2 button is supposed to take you in, but does not.)  So under my color printer Printing Preferences, Color tab, More Color Options, I get this.

So I print out a color calibration image 
On photo paper, the gray bar on the left is too dark (more medium gray than light gray), yellow is my favorite car color (too yellow),   the cysn is too cyan, the green and magenta are too dark, the red is not quite red enough, and the purple is too dark.  Hey, white and black are fine!

I have done a small amount of fiddling with those six controls, but I must not be turning them up enough to make an obvious improvement.

I cannot see that adjusting the Color Options changes anything at all.

2 comments:

  1. Get an Apple machine (one with a builtin monitor, like a laptop or iMac). Apple is serious about color quality, and if all the hardware (other than the printer) comes from them, the color will be about as correct on the screen as is possible.

    I say that as an Apple user who uses an external monitor (49" Samsung 4K TV). I just don't care that much myself, perhaps because I don't have that good a color sense.

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  2. Your printer uses 4 colors cymk to print what is shown on the screen in 3 colors rgb.

    They will never match exactly because there is always some conversion

    John Henry

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