I have a NEC PA302W monitor and use the MDVSENSOR3, made by Xrite, that came with the monitor. I was recently watching a printing video and Jeff Shewe had his calibration puck with the opaque filter on it, plugged into the computer and sitting on his desktop. He made a comment about always using this. Could someone explain to me what this is doing? Is it only used while printing? Does it measure ambient light and adjust the monitor to keep it closer to the calibration settings? Please explain to me like I am five.
I don’t have this system and have never used it but I found some reference to it on their website on page 33 of this document:
Thank you!
I have used an NEC monitor and its calibrating puck for several years. At first I tried to measure the ambient light using the puck, but found it cumbersome, hard to control and made no difference in my results. I no longer worry about it. I do use the system to calibrate the monitor at least once a month and this is very valuable.
I also have a NEC monitor with the XRite sensor and I have tried measuring the ambient light on a couple of occasions but to be honest, I never understood what it was for and why to do it so I now just simply calibrate my monitor every once in a while and that’s all.
Your question piqued my interest and I started looking into it and I found this info the other day. If I understand it correctly, it’s used to verify that your physical environment is close to your monitor in terms brightness and colour temperature for when you want to compare an on screen image to a print. Or to make sure that your monitor is in a dim enough room for editing.
@Tom_Nevesely @Matt_Payne @Ed_Cordes Thanks for the responses. I scoured the Spectraview manual and still can’t find anything about continuous ambient light monitering. Oh well a bit of mystery in life is a good thing.