Calibrating Eizo Flexscan Monitors
Eizo screens offer extensive calibration options, and we provide these notes as a guide to achieving a good calibration with an Eizo screen for general photographic editing.
The chief difference between an Eizo Flexscan line monitor and an Eizo ColorEdge monitor is in how you calibrate the monitors.
While both lines of monitor have hardware controls for white point, gamma and brightness that use the inbuilt hardware to make adjustments with much higher quality than typical monitors, it is only with the ColorEdge monitors that you can calibrate directly with the LUT in the back of the monitor.
With Flexscan monitors, you use a more typical 'software calibration' approach. But don't worry - they still calibrate absolutely beautifully. With the ColorEdge monitors, you perform 'hardware calibration' using the supplied Color Navigator software.
If you're interested, you can read more about the different types of monitor calibration.
Calibrating an Eizo Flexscan Monitor
Before starting please make sure you have plugged in the USB cable that came with your monitor!
These notes describes the process of using an Eye One Display Version 2 with an Eizo Flexscan 2110W, however you should easily be able to follow the spirit of these notes with other flexscan monitors (or other colour calibration systems) as well.
The goal is to simulate paper ...
These notes are about getting your Eizo set up to be a good proofing environment for photographic editing and prints. It is not a guide to getting the 'prettiest' or most colourful response out of your screen. If you also do video work, or simply watch movies on your Eizo, you may well want to create multiple set ups for your screen.
The first thing to notice about Eizo screens is that, out of the box, they are very, very bright. This is a good thing - the tubes are powerful and will be able to provide a sufficient level of brightness for photographic editing for a number of years. But when using the monitor, we will need to radically reduce the brightness from the default if we hope to simulate paper.
The first thing to do is to install the software that came with your monitor (if you're on a Mac just skip this step and start with the instructions here)
Once you've done that, you actually want to turn most of it off for now. The two main screens to worrry about are shown here:
In the second screen, you should also click the colour tab and set it up like this - make sure you check all the values are set ot zero - except the brightness, which at this stage can be anything, as we'll be changing it soon:
If your Eizo monitor offers any of the new features like 'dynamic contrast' or 'adaptive brightness' we suggest you turn these off when using your monitor for photographic work.
[If you're a Mac user this is your starting point!]
Now, we want to use the 'custom mode' of the monitor to calibrate your screen (rather than the 'text', 'sRGB', etc etc modes) - we can use the shorthand controls, rather than the main control panel, to get to this.
Use the right arrow (that usually sits immediately left of the power button) to get this mini menu up, and keep hitting the right arrow until the word custom appears at the top of the box:
The three settings below (which you can reach by hitting the down and up arrows) are:
- Luminance (brightness, the sun symbol)
- Whitepoint (in degerees kelvin, maybe be set either to a value like 6500K or set to 'off' to use the native white point of the panel)
- Gamma (should always be set to 2.2)
The screenshot above means 'don't do any hardware adjustment of whitepoint', set the gamma to 2.2, and the brightness is set to 11% of maximum. Once this panel is up, use the down arrow to move between the three options, and the left and right arrows to change the options if necessary (they should be correct if you've followed the instructions above). If the panel disappears, just use the right arrow to get it back again.
(The only control you will need to adjust during the calibration is the brightness control. On our screen, we reach the requested luminosity of 120 candellas using a brightness of just 11%!).
The Actual Calibration
Now, open Eye One Match and follow the calibration instructions here to complete the process - we use settings of 6500K, gamma 2.2 and 130 candellas. This results in a superb, highly accurate calibration that works wonderfully with accurate printer profiles to provide an uncannily accurate on-screen representation of our final prints.
Don't forget that all Eizo monitor have proper RGB controls for modifying the whitepoint during calibration - these can be found by bringing up the main Eizo menu (hit 'Enter') - navigating to the RGB section, hit enter, then navigate to 'Gain', hit enter, and you can then adjust the RGB values for your monitor.