As reported in my previous post Argyll software now offers in its latest 0.7 beta the support of the Spyder2. I've only recently found the time to do some testing.

First of all, I've downloaded the binary archive of the 0.7 branch from the Argyll website. Don't bother to compile everything by yourself, Argyll binaries are working "out of the box" in all the distros that I have (namely Gentoo and (K)Ubuntu). So it should work fine on yours.

Argyll will ask you to first build the driver support of your Spyder2 by using... the CD provided by Colorvision. Argyll will retrieve the .dll necessary to operate the Spyder2 from it and create a small driver package that dispcal will use to calibrate your screen.

While I had no problem with a relatively recent box from Colorvision, a CD from an older box didn't work and the Spyder2Pro drivers downloaded from the Colorvision website didn't work either. A quick fix here is to install the software under wine, and point spyd2en, the small utility from the Argyll suite, to the CVSpyder.dll somewhere in the Colorvision folder the install created.

From there, the calibration process is quite straight forward. I used:

./dispcal -yl -v2 -qm belinea

Where -y is the type of monitor (here l for lcd), -v2 (for a great verbosity) a -qm (for medium quality) and "belinea" is the name of the output file.

The result is good, and after going through some of my pictures, probably a bit better than the Colorvision utility. I still have to go through a "high" quality process to see if there is an improvement ("medium" was already way better than "low").

I've hear that the Argyll beta has been incorporated in Lprof which has a GUI, so I have to digg this as well. Stay tuned.