Matching Two Monitors using Spyder2 and a single, dual port NVIDIA adapter
2007-05-17 by bbass408
There have been many posts on the web about not being able to use the Microsoft Color Control Applet (WinColor) to assign the separate profiles created with the Spyder2 to individual monitors if you only have one graphics card. At least with an NVIDIA card, this is a somewhat solvable problem. If you use the "Dual View" mode in the nView settings in the NVDIA control panel, then both monitors on the single card will show up in WinColor. [This will not work with "Horizontal Span" or "Vertical Span" modes.] It's worthwhile to read this excellent article first: http://www.northlight- images.co.uk/article_pages/dual_monitor_calibration.html To assign the profiles using WinColor, "Install" the profiles for both monitors under the "Profiles" tab. Click the "Devices" tab, select one monitor at a time. For each monitor, "Add" the profile for that monitor, select it and click "Set As Default". To automatically load the profiles at startup: [Exceprted from the article on www.northlight-images.co.uk] Create a shortcut to WinColor.exe and put it in the Startup folder of your start menu. In the properties dialog for that shortcut, make sure you add the "/L" (autoload) argument to the "Target" property like this: Target: "C:\Program Files\Pro Imaging Power Toys\Microsoft Color Control Panel Applet for Windows XP\WinColor.exe" /L You can actually do this with only the Spyder2Express by running nView in "Clone" mode during the calibrations. In this mode, the ColorVision app will show up on both montors. Put the puck on the monitor you want to calibrate and go through the calibration wizard. Before calibrating the second monitor (which will overwrite the Spyder2Express.icm profile file) change the internal name of the profile using WinColor following instructions in the article on the northlight-images site referenced above. This will get the monitors close to matching, but probably not perfect. Other posts on this site might explain how to make that better and Spyder2Pro probably has features to facilitate that.