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Press Release Datacolor, the global leader in digital color management technology, today announced it will be offering Spyder3 Elite owners a feature enriched software upgrade, known as Spyder3 Elite 4.0, available for instant download on the Datacolor global website. In addition, Spyder3 Pro owners can take advantage of the upgrade to the new Spyder3 Elite.

macOS Big Sur users: Full support for macOS 11 Big Sur will be included in Spyder 4.2.1, scheduled for release on December 18, 2020.However, see our FAQ question on Big Sur for how to get it working right now.

The Blarney Stone of Calibration

Datacolor Spyder3 -- Charming Color Into Compliance

By MIKE PASINI
Editor
The Imaging Resource Digital Photography Newsletter

Review Date: April 2008

The beer around here recently turned green, as it does every year in the middle of March for some inexplicable reason. The thirsty encourage it by wearing a bit of green themselves. At the bunker, we decided to take this seriously by painting the whole place green.

Going green may be one of the newer virtues, but we predict it will never catch on where your monitor is concerned. Monitors cry out for a certain kind of balance that's frankly admirable. It makes your photographs look real, too.

The well-balanced monitor does not come out of a box. It takes some adjustment to get it right. Some people flatter themselves that they can do this by eye. And then never do. Others have been reading us for years and believe what we tell them: you need a little gadget to get this reliably right enough to do as frequently as it needs doing. A monitor calibrator.

Years ago we thought we'd seen enough of these gadgets. We'd calibrated our monitors and planned to live happily ever after, recalibrating every month or so with the same gadget.

Then things got interesting.

Pantone, famous in commercial printing circles for getting color right, came out with a little stick of a colorimeter called the huey that not only calibrated your monitor but stuck around to monitor the ambient light, adjusting monitor brightness as the room light changed.

Our review of the hueyPRO (http://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/HUEY/HUEY.HTM) noted the dissatisfaction our Atlanta lab guys had with its predecessor. But we found no such issues with the hueyPRO and continue to use one on our second computer here.

But in that review, we confessed we were long-time devotees of Datacolor's Spyder. Our main keyboard with two monitors has always relied on a Spyder for calibration. But those Spyders didn't monitor ambient light and they took longer than the hueyPRO to calibrate.

Enter the Spyder3.

Smaller than the Spyder2 (with a much more flexible USB cord, incidentally), it seems to have learned a few tricks from the huey. Like the huey, it comes with a stand (something the Spyder2 didn't have) and it can monitor ambient light (as did the Spyder2). It's also a good deal faster than the Spyder2, requiring 5 instead of 7 minutes for your first calibration and just 2.5 minutes to recalibrate. The Spyder2 recalibrated as slowly as it calibrated. It only knew one way.

Sensor Size. Spyder2 (left) has a significantly smaller sensor than the Spyder3.

It's also got the largest screen sample area (or aperture), which increases light sensitivity about 400 percent, according to Datacolor. Couple that with a seven detector color engine (which nobody else has except the Spyder2) and the Spyder3 can see things other colorimeters can't.

Like its predecessor, it can calibrate multiple monitors but the software has grown up. It's a lot easier to do the trickier things than it ever has been. And there are a few new tricks, too, like recording your monitor's white luminance history.

We never complained about our older Spyders but we never reviewed them either. Each one had some issue that seemed to require duct tape to resolve. But not the Spyder3. Datacolor seems to have gotten it right this time.

Datacolor use the Spyder3 name in a number of packages. The two colorimeter packages -- the $169 Spyder3Pro and the $279 Spyder3Elite -- use the same hardware with different software. A third package -- the $499 Spyder3Print -- is a spectrocolorimeter with software to calibrate your printer.

This review discusses the Spyder3Elite. It adds the following software features to the Spyder3Pro:

Spyders. The original Spyder (left), the Spyder2 (right) and the smaller Spyder3 (center).

Unlimited gamma choices, user defined
Custom targets (NTSC, PAL/SECAM, Cineon, L-Star)
Expert console
Custom B/W luminance control
Display History Utility
Studio Match function
Front projector calibration
Gamma curve editing
L-Star workflow option
Custom curves
PreciseLight Functions
Hi-Bit profiling option

The system requirements are rather modest, supporting Mac OS X 10.3 and higher or Windows 2000/XP/Vista via USB. Your color monitor's resolution should be 1024x768 or higher with a 16-bit video card (but you have a 24-bit card, no doubt). You need 100-MB of disk space and 128-MB of RAM.

The Spyder3 sports a new built-in ambient light sensor. Its seven filter/detector technology is 29 percent more accurate than the Spyder2 and suitable for profiling wide gamut, LED backlight and AdobeRGB displays. Initial calibration takes five minutes and the new ReCAL option only 2.5 minutes. The Spdyer3 can be mounted via its removable suction cup, with a counterweight or a tripod mount (for projection systems). The USB cable is integrated into the device which includes a cradle and a two year hardware warranty.

Both monitor calibration software (with an extensive Expert mode) and a utility to monitor ambient light are included with the Spyder3, which sports a new LED status indicator now. The LED remains illuminated when your system goes to sleep. A Quick Start Guide and screen cleaning packets are also included.

Installation is pretty straightforward. You 1) install the software, 2) plug in the Spyder3 and 3) launch the software. The Quick Start Guide steps you through that, adding that after calibration, you can 4) have the Spyder3 monitor your profiles and ambient light.

But there are a couple of other things you might do before that. The first is to clean your monitor. Datacolor provides a two-step Klear Screen wet and dry screen cleaner to do that. The other thing is to let your monitor warm up. CRTs take about 30 minutes to stabilize while LCDs are ready in just a few minutes (but it doesn't hurt to wait half an hour). Make sure no direct light is falling on your monitor.

Monitoring Ambient Light. Very high ambient light being monitored by the Spyder3. Note the blue LED, which remains lit when you put your system to sleep.

You should also decide whether you want to use the suction cup or the weight to hold the Spyder3 to the surface of your screen. You can use either method on either a CRT or an LCD. We were able to angle our screens so gravity did as well as the suction cup. We don't like sticking anything to our screen.

Finally, make sure you've disabled any screen saver. You don't want th

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