Calibrating Wide Gamut Dell U2413 with X-Rite Display Pro

[Richard Lundberg]

After six months of intermittent contact with Bruce Wright of X-Rite, who graciously offered to have his Dell liaison contact Dell tech support, I received this email from Juven Garcia:

"Richard

Thanks for your patience.

I confirmed with our development engineers the read me file alluded specifically to the older Mac OS 10.6 and 10.7 where crashes could occur.

The many variables of graphic solutions along with displays made it difficult to specifically spell out which configurations would cause crashes.



The newer OS versions 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 all work fine and you should not have any crash issues with any display.

The new OS corrected the communication issues with graphic solutions which would result in crashes present in older OS.

You have the OS 10.9.5 which should be fine for you to use the DCCS and U2413 display."

I bought an X-Rite Display Pro last year. I thought I would just set it up and proceed. But nooooooo. Dell tech support has never heard of monitors as far as I know. I appealed to Bruce Wright on a tip from one of the forums, possibly this one. He immediately sent me the link to the Dell UltraSharp Calibration Solution for Mac, on the Dell site. I installed it, and decided to look over the readme just for laughs. It said that some Macs may cause an unrecoverable crash that requires you to obtain a second monitor to reboot. In horror, I contacted Bruce again, knowing I would get nowhere with Dell. He asked his liaison guy to check this out, and I finally got a message from Dell a couple of weeks ago saying they were working on it. Yesterday I received the above, and I feel like I can now go ahead. I thanked Juven with a copy to Bruce, and I thought I would pass this on to those here who have the Dell U2413 or other wide gamut Dell monitors. Sorry, but I don't have a clue about other brands. The whole point of using the Dell solution software is to set the internal LUT of the monitor for a more accurate calibration than setting your video card.
I kinda think that using values from an 8 bit FRC interpolation to set points on a 10 bit curve may be a little nuts, but what the hey. At least I'll get to try this hundred something gadget.

[Manfred M]

Richard - while you blame Dell for this issue, and I hardly think that they are entirely blameless here, you should look more closely at how Apple handles support with third party hardware and software suppliers.

The video cooperative that I am a member of has an equal number of Apple (Mac Pro) and PC workstations. The majority of the users will start on the Apple workstations, but will do the specialty work on the PCs. The reason; custom hardware and software are often problematic on the Apple hardware and the various flavours of iOS. When we get in touch with the tech support of the hardware and software vendors they tell us that Microsoft has excellent documentation and technical support; Apple has virtually none.

The experience there is if you are using Apple, then stick with Apple supported hardware and software and you will have very few issues as they support their own stuff very well. Go with anything third party, and you are on your own.

[Richard Lundberg]

Dell tech support is far worse than Apple. I can usually find whatever I want online for Apple. Dell doesn't know they sell monitors, and I'm sure they don't build them themselves. Microsoft has more problems than anyone in history, it's no wonder they have good support.