Warning: That $60 "pro" color calibration tool I bought was a total scam

I spent $60 on this little spider-shaped gadget off Amazon to calibrate my monitor for print matching. Turns out it only works if your screen is less than 3 years old and has some specific backlight tech mine doesn't have. So I basically paid for a plastic paperweight and my prints still come out looking like muddy garbage. Has anyone else gotten burned by cheap calibration tools or found one that actually works for older monitors?

2 comments

2 Comments

grant5692d ago

Hate to say it, but this is just how things go now. Everything seems to be designed for the latest stuff and older gear gets left behind. It's like printers that refuse to work unless you buy their ink or phones that stop getting updates after two years. The whole system is built to make you throw away perfectly good stuff and buy new. You're not alone in getting burned, it's a common trap. Have you tried checking if your monitor has a simple color temperature setting you can tweak manually? That fixed a lot of my print issues before I gave up on those gadgets entirely.

paigewood3d ago

Burned a few bucks on one of those cheap calibrators myself a few years back. Had an old Dell monitor that just wouldn't play nice with it, same kind of headache. What finally worked for me was the Spyder5, but even then I had to dig around online for a legacy driver that supported my screen's backlight. Check if your monitor has a "sRGB emulation" mode in its own settings menu, sometimes that gets you close enough without any gadget.