color calibration

We’ve all heard it right? Calibrate your monitor otherwise, your colours will be different from what they should be, and your photographic work will become a potential mess without you even knowing how badly.

I recently sold my ASUS 27″ 4K monitor and side-graded to a 27″ Dell U2713H 1440p one instead. The main reasons being a wider colour gamut, a resolution easier on my eyesight (4k panels in Photoshop are just way too small for me, and the 200% option makes them far too big), and a way to gain some cash back.

On setting up the Dell for the first time at my house, I immediately noticed the extreme difference between my old calibrated 4K monitor and this new uncalibrated one.

However, this was quite a shock just how badly it was off by. It came with a piece of paper from Dell telling me that it was factory calibrated and was “smack on the money”. After doing a factory reset the monitor went from interpreting every colour as a variation of green (people looked like the incredible hulk) to a somewhat “I could work with this, but I wouldn’t trust it”.

Forward a couple of days and a good friend of mine Maarten De Booer shipped over his XRITE i1 pro for me to use to calibrate the new Dell.

The embedded video above shows you just how badly a factory reset monitor can be with regards to colour. And despite any amount of paperwork telling you it’s perfect, any pre-calibration should be ignored.