Spyder3Pro vs. Spyder3Elite: Your thoughts

[bchernicoff]

I am finally going to buy a monitor color calibration tool and these two seem to get favorable reviews. What's not clear to me is the difference between the two. I see that they sell software to upgrade from Pro to Elite, so it seems like the actual hardware is the same. Thoughts? Recommendations?

[Mt Spokane Photography]

If you have a high end $1000 or more monitor, the pro or elite will work.  To just adjust your ordinary Dell, Samsung, etc monitor, the express version is fine. 

I have the Spyder 3 Studio SR, It was a waste of money imho, very difficult to calibrate my epson 3800 pro printer.

[bchernicoff]

This would be for my 27" iMac.

[Axilrod]

This would be for my 27" iMac.

I had my 27" iMac calibrated with the SpyderElite and it made a pretty big difference.  It may look fine without calibration, but when you toggle the before and after it's definitely noticeable.  It will most likely end up warming the color a little, in most cases I've seen the default profile was too cool. 

[skitron]

I use the Elite and very pleased with it. Not sure about the other versions but the Elite license agreement allows installing and calibrating unlimited number of desktop computers and additionally up to five laptops. So I did everything I own plus some.

[te4o]

www.imagescience.com.au
You may check the differences in monitors and calibration tools there, lots of practical info.
iMac does NOT have the type of graphic card and monitor to allow you a big jump in color reliability and performance. Any calibrator will do only a software calibration which doesn't really change the monitor, just some software bits on the graphic card driver and in order to show you how efficient, how advanced and how much better your monitor looks now after the calibration they all generate a sample screen with some colored pictures and let you click on the AFTER button to check the effects ... No tricks there
This change ALWAYS looks the same no matter how many times in a row you calibrate your iMAC... you know how much it matters...
Besides, the monitors of the Macs are very pleasing to do computer work but are too much dead-end in terms of calibration, color accuracy and are over-contrasty too (deceptive psycho-trick to imply good photos- high contrast, high luminance, very bright... in the shop you can't look away.) And you can't really turn it down. In reality a printer cannot deliver that much contrast (less than 30% actually) and you can't really do proper color work with them, so => save your money. Find a hardware calibration monitor first and buy the calibrator for its system.
I use a 27 and a 30 " NEC PA both calibrated in the hardware of the monitor at 16 bit - this is not even touching the graphic card of the MAC PRO - by the Spyder3Elite. It does a good job there even if there are better options nowadays. But if I try to calibrate the 400$ 24" Samsung (which is actually a good system monitor, fast and contrasty, similar to the Samsungs in the iMacs or MacBook Pros from 2009-10) I just shake my head at the results and laugh when I see the BEFORE/AFTER screens
Good luck.
BTW, did you know how expensive photography can be when you bought your first DSLR...

[PeterJ]

I bought the Elite version to get the multiple display matching, although I didn't really think it through because my primary monitor is better than my secondary so I always tend to use that for image display and the secondary monitor for other stuff. So in retrospect I probably should have just bought the Pro version. I take it you've seen the comparison chart:

http://spyder.datacolor.com/s3compare.php

The Elite is the same hardware and just a software upgrade so it's not a particular disaster if you buy the Pro version and later decide you should have bought the Elite version, but it does end up costing $40 odd more going that way.

I've been happy with the results after looking at the before and after comparisons. About my only small peeve with it is the plastic suction cap supplied to hold it to the monitor says to use only on CRT monitors not LCD. It's not a hugely big deal but the calibration takes 5-6 minutes so it's a bit tedious holding it there that long.