Datacolor User to User Support Group.

>Hi Gene,
>
>The room I work in has very little lighting and none of it is
>fluorescent. Is there such a thing as daylight incandescent bulbs?

Yes Pierre. But I found the incandescent bulbs 
are usually poor.  I recommend low energy 
fluorescent "BULBS" that replace the incandescent 
bulbs. Currently at home improvement stores one 
can by these replacement "bulbs" that look like a 
miniature spiral fluorescent tube. They typically 
consume 27 watts and produce the equivalent light 
of a 100 watt incandescent bulb. However, 
carefully inspect the packaging to determine the 
color temperature. I use a lot of long 
fluorescent tubes in ceiling lights and on my 
desk where my computer resides. However, in a few 
table lamps, I use the replacement fluorescent 
bulbs mentioned above.

Another very important unit of measure is the 
color rendering number. It is on a scale of 0 to 
100. You can have a light that has a average 
distribution of color temperatures that is not 
uniform. In other words, there can be spikes in 
the color spectrum that will still yield the 
average desired color temperature. So the closer 
the color rendering is to 100, no spikes, the 
better. Typically somewhere between 90 and 95 is 
quite acceptable.

Phillips makes a fluorescent tube that is called 
"Natural Sunshine." it is 5000°K and has a color 
rendering of 92. They also make a tube that is 
called "Daylight Deluxe" It has a color 
temperature of 6500°K but also has a poor color 
rendering of 84. The down side of all this is 
that these Natural Sunshine tubes cost twice as 
much as the regular Cool White.

I just purchased from Home Depot a bunch of 
fluorescent bulbs for $7 each made by N:Vision, 
manufactured in GA. They produce 100 watts 
equivalent light yet consume only 27 watts. They 
are labeled "Daylight." They are also labeled as 
having a color temperature of 5500°K.

The whole purpose of calibrating your monitor is 
that you hope that what you see on your monitor 
is what comes out of your printer. While it can 
never be exact, is can be very close. If you see 
a color image on your screen and then look at the 
print under a poor light, it will not match. So 
matching the color temperature of the ambient 
lighting you are working in to that of the 
monitor is very important. Also be aware that the 
print should dry for at least 12 hours or more 
before color matching.

One word about the Spyder2 Pro. I found when 
calibrating my monitor with this device, to be 
very conservative on the manual brightness 
setting. If the monitor brightness is set too 
high, the colors on the monitor will appear very 
bright but not in the print.

Hope all this helps,

Gene