Spyder3Elite (PC/Mac)

Got my Spyder this morning and I'm pretty impressed. I bought it in the hope of solving a serious problem with the screen on my MacBook Pro (The screen is, by default, way too light, and attempts to recalibrate it by hand using the Mac's own calibration utility and the 3rd-party SuperCal utility resulted in excessive contrast and severe colour casts, making it basically unusable for colour work).Basically, the Spyder paid for itself in five minutes - after one quick-and dirty calibration, the MacBook screen is now perfectly usable. Having calibrated the desktop monitor too, there's a tiny difference in colour temperature between the two machines, but they're perfectly usable as is, and the software has plenty of options to let me fine-tune later on.Pros: Does the job straight out of the box without me even having to read the instructions (though I'm sure I'd have got slightly better results if I had)Cons: When first activated, the Spyder software installer looks for older versions of the software to update - trouble is, on one of my machines the text explaining this was in (I think) Chinese(!), leaving me a little in doubt as to how to proceed...Number of swearing-minutes to set up: One, because of the Chinese dialog box, none in setting up or running the software/hardware.

Good product, simplifies colour calibration successfully, & at a reasonable price compared to competitors such as colormunki.I initially had poor results involving red colour cast, and found the manual to be very lacking. However, a couple of emails from the manufacturers website to their excellent customer support solved the problem (just a setting change required).It may be noteworthy to amateur photographers/art/graphic design enthusiasts, that if you have a computer running nvidia graphics/video cards you probably won't notice much difference (it'll be subtle but there) after calibration - so it may be worth seriously considering how important precise colour calibration is to you. On the other hand, the only time I've had a laptop with an ATI Radeon card, I found colours to be hideously oversaturated and found it very difficult to correct by eye to a bearable point even for casual use.

Well I was nearly going to return this.For a start, the documentation says it doesn't work on multi-head monitors, which is why I bought it. In practice, it recognises the screens attached to my Radeon HD 5770 fine. It also says you should only use direct USB ports, not via hubs / keyboards etc., but the length of USB cable provided makes that completely impracticable. It did work via the port on my keyboard.Secondly, after installing the software (I'm on Win 7), it kept crashing when I tried to calibrate my monitors. Only after a reboot would it actually work. So, after some work, I'm finally calibrated, and my monitors do at least have near-identical white balances, which they didn't before. I have to say, though, that they all look a bit too blue to me.So, in summary, no problems with the hardware (except the cable length), but the software could be a lot better.

Fast shipping and Spyder 3 is amazing tools for photographers.

Excellent product, buy a second hand one as chances are people buy them, calibrate their device and then send it back. made a huge difference to my monitors and laptop screen.

Excellent bit of kit easy to set up and follow on screen instructions nice to get both machines to have same look as each other, would definitely recommend it to anyone who is serious about their editing.

After calibrating my monitor with this product, I was amazed how wrongly my pictures were displayed before. This product works very well on my Dell 2408wfp. It is quite easy to use.

I have one of these, a top spec NVIDIA graphics card and a Dell U2711 monitor capable of displaying most of Adobe RGB.I had previously used a basic EyeOne device which gave consistent results and displayed the majority of desired colours.The Spyder 3 Elite seems to be capable of capturing slighly more colours - great!However there are 2 problems: A minor problem (major on less good monitors) is that it seems to go a little overboard on reds. The main problem I have with the device is that its utterly useless in daylight. If I calibrate in the office in the middle of the day the results are just hideous. I know I should use a hood but the EyeOne could manage it so why can't the Spyder?To get around this problem I calibrate my monitor just before I go home when its starting to get dark. The results are far better and possibly exceed the EyeOne.Calibrating projectors is a little more troublesome but again, the trick of doing it in low light seems to work.