Samsung Natural Color Expert for XL30

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sedluk

n00b
Joined
Nov 28, 2004
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17
I had one of the first Apple 30" monitors. That was back when you had to pay $1,000 for a video card that would handle 2560x1600. After many years it was showing its age. I was watching these LED monitors for a while. I saw them at a CES show a couple of years ago. It took a long time to bring them to market. They are finally coming down in price so I bought one for $2,800 from CompSource. Interesting they raised the web price $50 the day after I bought mine. They did not raise my price just the price for those who had not placed orders.

Overall it is a very nice monitor. As far as I can tell there are no bad pixels. Compared to the Apple 30" the picture is significantly better. I own two Apple 30" monitors, the oldest and the one that was used the most was really showing its age. It would still calibrate well, and it was still bright, be there was lot of ghosting when moving windows. Any area of a solid color would just look patchy or have a pattern.

Now my big beef with the XL30 is that I cannot get the Natural Color Expert to run on my Vista 64 machine. It installs fine but when I run it I get a message to restart before using it and it closes. I used my 1 eye display 2 to calibrate the monitor and it looks great. But I want to calibrate the monitor not the video card. If anyone out there has found a solution please let me know. I called Samsung, they are very nice but do not have a solution.
 
I have tried version: V.1.0.22 and then I found a V.1.0.32 (NCESetup_eyeone_VISTA_0905_1032)

I am not sure why they have two versions floating out there.

Neither has worked for me.
 
Congrats on your purchase. Let us know how your copy turned out (if the previously reported bugs have been ironed out) as well as any QC issues.

Looks like the XL30 is coming closer to a price-point where it could be a serious competitor to the Nec3090 /sigh
 
Does it install a service? If so, try setting it to delayed start and then reboot, this is required for some LUT loaders so it's worth a try.
 
I looked through all of the services and did not find any that work with Natural Color Expert.
 
I disconnected my RAID card and connected an external eSATA drive and installed XP. I then loaded up the Samsung Natural Color Expert and ran the calibration.

Now it is my understanding that the program creates a color lookup table, similar to the one that is created using my one eye display 2. But NCE will load the color lookup table into the monitor. That way you do not need a color lookup table in your video card. The idea as I understand it is that you can get a better color scale by having the translation done in the monitor at 14 bits. This would be better than the 8 bit translation done in the monitor.

After calibrating the monitor I switched back to the Vista 64 drive. I then remove the ICC because I think I should no longer need one as long as the monitor is in Calibrated mode.

The results look better to me with the monitor in the default mode and using the ICC from the one eye display 2.

With the monitor in the calibrated mode it looks a little to red. I did not spend much time in XP to see if this was the same result. But my guess is that you really need to run NCE on your machine.

Another interesting thing I saw was the effect that looks like signal error. I have seen others describe this. I saw this while changing monitor color modes (sRGB, Adobe,emul, Calibrated, default). It only appeared in sRGB, Adobe, emul, Calibrated. I rebooted and it went away in Calibrated mode which was the only mode that I was using.

Other observations are a very faint square on the center surface of the monitor. It is a very subtle effect that is only seen when the monitor is turned off. If looks like something they must have done during manufacturing. I wiped the monitor surface clean and it reduced it. Maybe they use a 5" by 5" device to calibrate the monitor and it leaves this effect on the center of the screen. Not really a problem, because you cannot see it when the monitor is on.

Overall I am satisfied for the time being. The text is better than any other monitor I have seen. Pictures are better and have a better color than anything I have seen. It is a little frustrating that Samsung does not have software yet that will work with Vista 64. I would think that many of their potential customers would be using Vista 64. Here we have a monitor that costs $2,800+, Photoshop CS3 supports native 64 bit, all of the latest printers support Vista 64 bit. I would think that many of their potential customers would have expensive machines with more than 3GB of memory.
 
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