Recommend a monitor calibration tool please

Question

I use a MacBook Pro. 15" And Aperture. What units are folks using to calibrate their monitors?
Spyder3?
X-Rite EODIS2 Eye-One Display 2?
Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

6500 white point and 2.2 gamma are recommended.
There are two principles to understand -
1. Always purchase a proper spectrophotometer, not a mere colorimeter. The spectral radiation curves for different types of emittive devices are unsurprisingly different. CRT's are different from LCD's and LCD's are different from LED's. These differences are better captured by a spectrophotometer, whereas a colorimeter is optimised and the difficulty is that what it is optimised for is not documented. The X-Rite Monitor Optimiser was a colorimeter, and it worked OK for CRT's but not for LCD's when they came along. The GretagMacbeth Spectrolino and Eye-One could capture the spike red spectral curve in LCD's better. Today, the discussion is whether a colorimeter works well with the green in LED's but I don't follow this except out of the corner of an eye.
2. As long as you have a colour display, calibrated to a stable condition, and characterised in an ICC type MNTR Monitor profile, you can set the white point and gamma to what you want since the ICC framework will match through the D50 illuminant Profile Connection Space virtually. The difficult part is not the ICC framework, which is based on a mathematical model of the illuminant, but how you set up your studio lighting and studio viewing box which are physical light sources and not mathematical illuminants. The original idea is that you set up your studio light sources to 5000 - 5500 Kelvin along the lines of the D50 illuminant, but there are as many theories as there are colour consultants.
/hh