Calibrating a dell latitude 600 laptop - is it worthy?

General Color & Graphics Monitor Calibration & Soft Proofing
1

Hi

I am an enthusiast of digital photo and I have been printing some good pictures on my epson 1280 printer with canned profiles and some that are not so good. My pictures look some times far different on the screen of my laptop than what I get on my printer. I am letting photoshop CS doing all the color management work, not the printer. I have noticed some pictures that print with close colors but darker than what I see on the screen and some times pictures that print with a skin tone completely off of what I see on the screen.

I have not calibrated my monitor and it has no profile attached to the display in windows (xp pro sp2). Is it worthy to spend $319 on the bundle coloreyes/DPT94 to profile my laptop monitor (I do not want to have an external monitor yet)? What should I expect after calibrating it (will I be able to have less difference on the screen and the printing?

Thanks for your help.

2

After waiting for some weeks and doing extensive research on the web, I decided to try calibrating my monitor and respond to my question myself. I bought from Chromix an eye-one display 2 calibrator (this is the recommended solution for calibrating laptops and is also a very good option to calibrate good monitors. Additionally, the performance of the device with coloreyes is also very good. So you can have multiple options).

I calibrated my laptop (dell latitude d600) and I was impressed with the results. Now the colors that I see on the screen are realy close to reality, the detail in the shadows has improved significantly and there are no color casts. The neutral tones and skin tones are also very good.

Soft proofing is also working now. I am able to see how the colors will look like in the printer with different types of paper and rendering intents. I am very happy with the results.

Conclusion: If you have the question I had (is is worthy to calibrate a laptop?), do not think twice and get a good calibrator like eye-one display 2 and calibrate your monitor. It really works!

Thanks to Rick Hatmaker from chromix who patiently oriented me and answered multiple questions around this topic.

JG