Today’s Question: After viewing your “Color Management for Photographers” video training course, I have decided that I need to calibrate both my monitor and printer. Which product do you currently recommend for this?
Tim’s Quick Answer: The display calibration tool I consider to represent excellent quality at a good price (and therefore the product I recommend most) is the ColorMunki Display from X-Rite, which you can find here: http://timgrey.me/munkidisplay
More Detail: There are, of course, a variet of options available. While I highly recommend (and do own) the ColorMunki Display, I actually use the X-Rite i1Display Pro package (http://timgrey.me/proi1display). This tool does offer a bit more control over the calibration process, but frankly it isn’t control that is really needed. In other words, I continue to use the i1Display Pro because I own it, but if I were buying a new monitor calibration tool today I would opt for the ColorMunki Display.
There are also a variety of other options available, including some very good tools from DataColor. That includes, for example, the Spyder5EXPRESS package, which you can find here: http://timgrey.me/spyder5x
The most important thing is that you use a package that includes a high-quality colorimeter. This is the device you actually place on the display to read the color and tonal values presented by the included software. Those values are then used to determine the compensation required for the display to be as accurate as possible, which forms the basis of the new display profile that will be created by the software you’re using to calibrate the display.