After buying a second 22”Samsung LCD 226BW. I bought the first one around a year ago, right in the middle of the big panel debate (if you don’t know what I’m talking about search for that model monitor and “S panel”.) Basically Samsung outsourced its panels to a few other manufacturers and while they weren’t “bad” monitors, the Samsung made panels were far better. I got lucky and my original monitor turned out to be a S panel and I have been insanely happy with it.

Flash forward to now, I order a second monitor and receive an “A panel”. While the monitor is very good quality, no stuck pixels, etc there is one problem. The monitor has a SEVERE blue tint to it under normal setup. Using the built in color adjustment I robbed the monitor of almost all blue color, from a setting of “50” to a setting of “5” and there was still a pronounced blue tint. Doing what any normal person would do I decided to spend more money and get a monitor color calibrator.

I wasn’t aware they had dropped so greatly in price, and after searching Amazon.com I ordered this Spyder2Express.

Now after ordering I noticed a serious problem, this product only works on a single monitor. You need the $160 device to support dual monitors. So after a little searching and a little playing I figured out there are ways around it. So here I’m going to outline how to use this with dual monitors on Windows Vista and XP.

PreReq’s :

Windows Vista comes with a built in utility to manage color profiles where as Windows XP does not. Usually color profiles end with a *.icm file extension. These are stored in x:\WINDOWS\System32\Spool\drivers\Color on both a Vista machine and an XP machine.

So if you have windows XP grab the “Microsoft Color Control Applet”, it can be found here Microsoft Color Control Applet and its provided straight from Microsoft. With this applet you get the same control that they now built into Vista. This applet gets installed into the Control Panel. So before you go and run a Spyder2Express there are some things you should know. First uninstall Adobe Gamma, or any type of color profile management software. Including the monitors software i.e. Samsung. After this you’re ready to run the color calibrator.