psyToy

Tuesday, June 26th, 2007

I have recently become the owner of a shiny, new 22″ widescreen AOC 210V LCD monitor. Like pretty much every other 22″ LCD out there, it’s a Chimei panel. I wasn’t too impressed with the default colour settings which resulted in an overemphasis of blue and an overburned image.

This prompted me to borrow the Colorvision Spyder Pro 2 from the work studio to properly colour calibrate the monitor. After calibration, the AOC is really quite a different beast. Greys are neutral, the blue tone is gone and there is a surprising amount of detail in the white areas. I calibrated to 2.2, 6500K which is a common colour space.

Here are the colour profiles I generated. There are a few steps involved to get it working.

Install the software

First we install Monitor Calibration Wizard and the custom colour profiles. The nice thing about MCW is it is able to disable other applications from overriding your colour settings. Games typically do this.

1. Download and install Monitor Calibration Wizard 1.0
   
2. Download my AOC 210V colour profiles. Unzip all the .MCW files to C:\Program Files\Monitor Calibration Wizard

Adjust your AOC 210v monitor

1. Access your monitor setting by pressing the MENU button on the bottom right of the monitor.
2. Go to the “Extras” menu and choose “Reset”. This will revert your monitor to factory default settings.
3. Go to the “ColorTemp” menu and change the “ColorTemp” setting to “User”.
4. Change “User-R” to 58
5. Change “User-G” to 55
6. Change “User-B” to 55

Apply the colour profile

1. Load Monitor Calibration Wizard (Start > All Programs > Monitor Calibration Wizard > Monitor Calibration Wizard)
2. Under “Load profile”, choose “AOC 210v C50 B90 R58 G55 B55″ from the drop down menu and click “Load”. This should change all the colours on your monitor (and hopefully for the better!)
3. If you’re happy with the results, tick the “Load at Windows startup” and “Persistent profile” options. This will load the profile at Windows startup and keep it loaded, even if other applications try to change the colour space.

Additional profiles

You might also want to try some of the other included colour profiles. You’ll need to adjust your monitor settings depending on which profile you use:

• Warm Game - Set ColorTemp to Warm and Eco to Game
• Warm Internet - Set ColorTemp to Warm and Eco to Internet
• Warm Movie - Set ColorTemp to Warm and Eco to Movie
• Warm Sports - Set ColorTemp to Warm and Eco to Sports
• Warm Standard - Set ColorTemp to Warm and Eco to Standard
• Warm Text - Set ColorTemp to Warm and Eco to Text

ICC profiles

If you want the above profiles as ICM files, they are available here. For more information on ICC profiles and how to install them, check out Andrew Swihart’s review of the Samsung 226BW.

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