Display Calibrator Assistant: Too Blue?

Question

Just brought home my third MBP, after swapping the second for the vertical lines issue.
I'm attempting to calibrate the display, but I'm running into problems with the Display Calibrator Assistant.
In Expert Mode, the luminance boxes don't give me enough adjustability to gray the image. The brightness box (left) is fine, but the color box (right) only has shades of blue. The bottom of the box is still slightly blue, and there's never a point at which it adjusts into yellow.
Net result, any Expert Mode calibration comes out overly blue-tinted. Non-Expert Mode is actually more accurate, just setting the native calibration to 2.2 gamma.
I'm pretty sure this isn't just perception. I kept a grayscale up, and you could see some blocks were yellow and some were blue, because the adjustability wasn't there to smooth the color curve properly across all the various luminances.
Anyone seen this? Anyone know a way around it, or an alternate (free) ICS creator? I'm not going to spring for a Spyder3, but I get a little concerned when the hardware doesn't work with the software--seems like in Apple's world, that means something might be out of whack.

Answer 1

Yeah, I'm aware of the danger here, but I'm pretty sure this isn't falling under perception. The range on the color side of the calibrator goes from extremely blue to just a little blue. The laptop itself is producing much warmer grays outside the calibrator, just not inside it. My desktop screen is also calibrator (Windows, using Adobe Gamma), so I have an independent reference point.
If I crank the right side of the calibrator down to "just a little blue" at each luminance level (which is the closest I can get the apple to match, even though it's still bluer than the background), I can see the problem in the ICS file.
The color curves on the resultant profile show dips for the other colors, and a straight diagonal line for blue. This corresponds with an extreme amount of blue push in the display, where the other colors are dropped out in the midranges and blue is not.
In other words, this doesn't come down to a "by-eye" thing. The calibrator itself does not have enough adjustability to make the foreground apple match the background target.