Everybody like a vibrant and bright display, it catches the eye, but as photographers, we need to be more interested in what is accurate, not some artificial ideal of color. Most LCD displays are very bright when used at the default out-of-the-box settings. With modern LCD displays, that isn't necessarily the case though - color is often close to correct in hue, but luminance, or brightness, is a common issue. Back when CRT displays were the common screen type, color could be wildly different and it was usually pretty easy to detect when the display was at fault. In almost all cases, it's a lack of having a calibrated display that is causing the issues. The image is too dark, skin tones are too red, any number of problems. When it's all done, the image is posted online or printed and suddenly it looks like you did all the image correction in the dark. Yes, you can tweak the image until the sky is that perfect hue of blue, or the skin tones have just the right amount of warmth and vibrancy. One of the most overlooked elements to creating a quality digital image is color accuracy.

Developed for professional photographers, videographers and others who must match colors precisely, Spyder4 delivers an average of 26% more accuracy and improved low-luminance performance over the previous Spyder3 technology.

Priced at $249, the Spyder4Elite can be used to calibrate monitors, laptops, projectors, TVs, iPads and even iPhones and it offers the highest level of user customisation out of the three available models. The Spyder4Elite is the top of the range colour calibration device from Datacolor.

Datacolor spyder 4 elite review