What color is your monitor?

So I had a trip early last month that took me to Arizona and Carolina for an event and a boogie.  When I got back, needless to say I had a lot of pictures.  About half way through editing these shots I realized that my colors were a bit off.  I pulled up an old image that I had edited a while back on my other machine and it wasn’t quite right, pretty good, but not perfect.  I pulled out my Spyder Screen Calibrator 2.0 and hooked it up to my new dual monitor Windows 7, 64-bit work horse only to find out that woops….it doesn’t work on Windows 7.  Off to the wonders of the internet and I ordered myself this:

ColorVision’s Spyder3 Pro.  So you might be asking, why do you need to calibrate your screen?  Well, as time goes on and you leave your monitors on for days on end or beat them up here and there, things change and they need to get calibrated.  This Spyder device literally hangs over the front of your screen and a program runs showing off different colors and ranges, etc….The Spyder has a sensor that is reading the color as it’s happening and the program adjusts it one way or the other to make sure that Red is showing up EXACTLY as Red and not Red with a little Orange.  Once it calibrates each monitor it applies a Color Profile to each and from that point forward, the profile adjusts images being displayed so that the colors are spot on.

Make sense?  This unit is the pro version which is needed for dual monitors and goes for around $150.  For the average home user / casual photographer you can grab the Spyder 3 Express for around $90.