Description

Advanced. Precise. Colour Accuracy.

Spyder5PRO monitor calibration will take your skill to the next level with precise and accurate monitor color.

True colours – on screen and in print

Break free from the frustration of your prints not matching your on-screen image. Spyder5PRO determines optimal monitor brightness so you can see the fine shadow details and highlights in your photos, ensuring your edited images match your prints.

Room Light Monitoring

Spyder5PRO’s integrated room light sensor continually measures your room’s lighting conditions and alerts you if there’s been a change among three ambient light levels. Then you can choose to either modify your calibration settings or adjust your room lighting to assure optimal colour accuracy.

Fast & Easy

Spyder5PRO software is extremely easy to use, with a simple step-by-step wizard that guides you through the initial 5 minute calibration process, for all of your desktop and laptop monitors. Then perform a fast monthly recalibration in half the time to keep colours consistent.

Tomorrow’s Technology

Next generation Spyder technology comes with a colorimeter that is compact, portable and protected. We’ve redesigned Spyder’s patented 7-detector optical engine to deliver up to a 55% improvement in tonal response, resulting in more accurate shadow detail and smoother gradients.

Personalized “Before and After” with SpyderProof

See the nuances that matter most with a “Before and After” evaluation of your calibration results using your own image, or a professional Datacolor composite image. SpyderProof gives you confidence that your monitors achieve precise colour accuracy.

Display Analysis

It’s important to know the characteristics of your display when doing colour-reliable work. Get to know how your monitors perform with the Display Analysis feature, which allows you to compare the colour, brightness, contrast, gamut, tone response and white point across all of your laptop and desktop monitors.

Specifications

Please note: Specifications are provided as a guide only.

We try very hard to keep these up to date and correct, but if a particular specification is really critical to you, then please double check the specification directly with the manufacturer. Some features may of course have caveats not fully described here.

To get more information about a particular specification, use the arrow to get a 'Specxplanation'.

Calibrator Technology

Colorimeter

Calibrators come in two main types:
Colorimeters - can only read light emitting devices, like monitors. They are generally the best (and most affordable) option for calibration monitors. Essentially these are like simple digital cameras with a sensor and some filters in front of the sensor to separate the different colours of light.
Spectrophotometers - These measure the actual spectral wavelengths of light. They have their own light source so can handle both light emitting devices like monitors and reflective materials like paper. They're very good at print but not as good as colorimeters for monitors generally, as they have some difficulty reading deep shadows on monitors.
A third type 'Spectrocolorimeter' - is something Datacolor came up with in their print calibrators. We at Image Science are not huge fans.
Connection

USB
Display Technology Support?

CRT
LCD (CCFL Backlight)
LCD (LED Backlight)
OLED
Calibrators have filters in them and depending on the characteristics of the displays they are measuring, they may or may not support that type of display.
The display types are:
- CRT - Cathode Ray Tube - these are the older type of screens, the large thick monitors of yore with thick glass over the screen. Almost all of these are retired now.
- LCD - Liquid Crystal Displays - the modern flatscreen monitor. Available with two different types of backlighting technology - fluorescent and LED.
- OLED - An emerging technology, Organic Light Emitting Diode. Not many monitors are OLED yet, although we are now seeing laptops with them coming through. It's expected these will grow in popularity in coming years. Very high end TVs are now often OLED based.
- Plasma - No longer made, these were a wonderful quality display technology used for TVs
- Front Projector - Popular in home cinemas and board rooms everywhere!
Color Temperature Choices

5000K
5800K
6500K
Monitor Native

What colour temperarture choices for white point does the system allow you to make?
At a minimum, 6500K and monitor native should be offered. 6500K is the standard whitepoint in general use in the photographic world, and lower end monitors don't like having their whitepoint adjusted so monitor native is the best to use in those cases.
However, ideally you can set any whitepoint you like, so that you can, for instance, adjust your monitor to look more like specific paper types.
Gamma Choices

1.8
2.0
2.2
2.4

What gammas can you choose when calibrating?
Pretty much everyone should be using 2.2.
Some might want to experiment with L* in some obscure cases.
Target Size and Choices

70 patches

How many patches are used (measured) in the calibration process? More (to a point) is better from a quality point of view, although it makes the process take longer of course.
200 to 400 patches is generally enough.
Also - can the calibrator target the reproduction of specific colours, such as specific Pantones?
Uniformity Measurement?

Uniformity is still an issue with modern LCD monitors, especially lower quality ones. Does the calibrator have a system for assessing the screen uniformity?
(Unfortunately there's no system for correcting screen uniformity issues, other than getting a better monitor!)

Multiple Display Support?

Can you calibrate multiple monitors connected to the one computer?
Note, even if the calibarator supports this, your system must as well. This means all video cards in your system must have a separate LUT table.
All Macs have this, and most desktop PCs as well. Some PC laptops have single LUT systems although it's been some time since we've seen this actually.
ICC Profile Version Support

ICC V2
ICC V4

ICC V2 is the most compatible and in fact for monitors there's really no practical benefit to ICC V4 support really.
In general, table based profiles are more accurate than matrix profiles, so this is desirable.
Monitor History Report?

Devices with a monitor history report can show you how the behaviour of your screen is changing over time.
This can be useful in diagnosing issues and planning hardware upgrades.
Monitor Quality Report?

Will the system give you a report on the quality of your monitor?
Measuring a monitor's quality with the same device you used to calibrate it is of dubious benefit, though - as any error is likely to be repeated, so the device might well report that things are fine when they are not.
Operating System Compatibility

Windows 7 (32/64)
Windows 8/8.1 (32/64)
Windows 10 (32/64)
OSX 10.7 Lion
OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion
OSX 10.9 Mavericks
OSX 10.10 Yosemite
OSX 10.11 El Capitan
OSX 10.12 Sierra

We try and keep this as up to date as we can. If your OS version is not listed, check directly with the manufacturer as they usually have an update page listing compatibility up pretty quickly.
App Support?

Can you use the calibrator with an app on your Apple i device or Android device?
Note, this will allow you to display calibrated images within that app only - there is no general support for colour management on mobiles/tablets yet.
DisplayCAL Support?

DisplayCAL is an open source application built on top of the excellent argyll cms open source colour management system.

It is available for Linux, Windows and OSX.

It's an extremely good calibration package, in many ways better than the manufacturer's own software, and well worth checking out - see this comprehensive page for details.

Often DisplayCAL can be used to rescue older calibrators when the manufacturer has stopped supporting legacy operating systems.
Full Specifications

DataColor Product Page

In The Box