Garbz
No longer a newbie, moving up!
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2003
- Messages
- 9,713
- Reaction score
- 203
- Location
- Brisbane, Australia
- Can others edit my Photos
- Photos NOT OK to edit
It's not often I write something bad about a program but this one takes the cake.
After downloading the trial of this calibration and profiling program to try and generate an ICC profile for a uni experiment and checking the manual to see yes my display is supported and can be hardware calibrated I fired it up and low and behold the option for "Hardware (LUT)" was totally greyed out. After messing with it and looking through the help finding nothing I decided to see how calibration goes with using the DDC to control brightness of the screen and the videocard's lookup table (this is not ideal since it limits the possible colour output in order to make the colours appear correct. Something they call "Combined hardware software calibration"
So after 10 min of twiddling my thumbs it brings up a window saying calculating please wait. And so I wait. and wait. and wait. and give up. It managed to do all the calibration work and then lockup while simply writing the ICC profile, a trivial task given that the spec is open and there is free example code to do it available.
Ok so the above was probably my fault right? So I reset my screen using the NEC software (the DDC control turned it surprisingly dark definitely unusable for photos) uninstalled the software, rebooted, reinstalled, and .... now the "Combined hardware Software" option is greyed out. Say what? So now it can't even control my screen anymore? Ok no biggie, try again using software only. So I painstakingly spend 10 minutes fiddling with the controls, something which was automated only half an hour earlier, and get through the calibration, and volah ICC profile done, and looking totally wrong.
At this point I gave up and removed the software and restored my old profile. But upon rebooting my computer is now showing the wrong screen resolution, and the wrong screen, oh and NEC's software doesn't even recognise the screen as attached anymore. So I'm here trying to reinstall the drivers for my monitor / video card trying somehow to get windows to say "NEC blah blah blah (Digital)" instead of just "Plug and Play" and nothing is happening. I am at this point very pissed since this program wasted several hours of my life, and I simply restored a ghost image of my windows partition to erase it from ever having been on my computer.
@#$@% The screen still isn't working. At this point I'm panicking and I call up NEC tech support. After a while getting no where with the staff they sound like they are getting close to asking me to set the screen back on a warrenty claim. I even tried plugging my screen into a different computer in the house, same deal Plug and Play limited at 1280x720. When I plugged the screen back into my computer (at this point NEC have recommended I start the process of a warrenty repair) I accidental plug it into my analogue connector on my computer and volah screen identified correctly. So in analogue it works but when I switch to DVI it again doesn't do anything. Finally I figure out that via the DVI-A connection I get DDC control, fire up the NEC software and reset the screen. Game over I win!
I must say I even prefer the "Vista" experience to this. I wonder how many people out there stuck in this situation would have gotten their screen working again.
I hope anyone who uses basICColor display 4 has a better experience than I do. To be fair to the company I didn't try their tech support, but still a piece of software that somehow manages to completely screw the connection on the screen end even though NEC's DDC spec is easily acquired and probably implemented given that the screen is listed as supported by the software, well given I removed it (killed one may say) I think it deserves a Darwin award.
After downloading the trial of this calibration and profiling program to try and generate an ICC profile for a uni experiment and checking the manual to see yes my display is supported and can be hardware calibrated I fired it up and low and behold the option for "Hardware (LUT)" was totally greyed out. After messing with it and looking through the help finding nothing I decided to see how calibration goes with using the DDC to control brightness of the screen and the videocard's lookup table (this is not ideal since it limits the possible colour output in order to make the colours appear correct. Something they call "Combined hardware software calibration"
So after 10 min of twiddling my thumbs it brings up a window saying calculating please wait. And so I wait. and wait. and wait. and give up. It managed to do all the calibration work and then lockup while simply writing the ICC profile, a trivial task given that the spec is open and there is free example code to do it available.
Ok so the above was probably my fault right? So I reset my screen using the NEC software (the DDC control turned it surprisingly dark definitely unusable for photos) uninstalled the software, rebooted, reinstalled, and .... now the "Combined hardware Software" option is greyed out. Say what? So now it can't even control my screen anymore? Ok no biggie, try again using software only. So I painstakingly spend 10 minutes fiddling with the controls, something which was automated only half an hour earlier, and get through the calibration, and volah ICC profile done, and looking totally wrong.
At this point I gave up and removed the software and restored my old profile. But upon rebooting my computer is now showing the wrong screen resolution, and the wrong screen, oh and NEC's software doesn't even recognise the screen as attached anymore. So I'm here trying to reinstall the drivers for my monitor / video card trying somehow to get windows to say "NEC blah blah blah (Digital)" instead of just "Plug and Play" and nothing is happening. I am at this point very pissed since this program wasted several hours of my life, and I simply restored a ghost image of my windows partition to erase it from ever having been on my computer.
@#$@% The screen still isn't working. At this point I'm panicking and I call up NEC tech support. After a while getting no where with the staff they sound like they are getting close to asking me to set the screen back on a warrenty claim. I even tried plugging my screen into a different computer in the house, same deal Plug and Play limited at 1280x720. When I plugged the screen back into my computer (at this point NEC have recommended I start the process of a warrenty repair) I accidental plug it into my analogue connector on my computer and volah screen identified correctly. So in analogue it works but when I switch to DVI it again doesn't do anything. Finally I figure out that via the DVI-A connection I get DDC control, fire up the NEC software and reset the screen. Game over I win!
I must say I even prefer the "Vista" experience to this. I wonder how many people out there stuck in this situation would have gotten their screen working again.
I hope anyone who uses basICColor display 4 has a better experience than I do. To be fair to the company I didn't try their tech support, but still a piece of software that somehow manages to completely screw the connection on the screen end even though NEC's DDC spec is easily acquired and probably implemented given that the screen is listed as supported by the software, well given I removed it (killed one may say) I think it deserves a Darwin award.
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