Can Powerstrip help?

[Ronald Halicki]

I recently bought two LaCie 324 monitors for my photography business.  They came with monitor color calibration software called Blue Eye Pro.  This software uses DDC mode to calibrate my monitors and makes an 'ICC" file.  My system is an AMD K9NSLI mother board, AMD Dual Core 6600 processor, XP Pro, 3GB RAM, with NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT and GeForce 6600GT graphic cards.  After profiling the monitors with the software and making the ICC created per monitor and attaching that profile to the windows color management per monitor, when I reboot I lose the color correction the DDC provided in the monitor settings.  Will Powerstrip help me?  Is there any documentation a novice in DDC can understand? [/code]

[Rik Wang]

Maybe. I'm not sure why you'd lose your settings after rebooting, bt try the instructions in this FAQ.

The basic idea is you calibrate your monitor using whatever it is you want to use, then you capture the results in PowerStrip, which in turn saves them to the registry. Then you can apply those calibrated results at will in all the usual PowerStrip ways (profiles, hotkeys, etc.).

I'm curious about something though: you have two monitors, and two different graphics cads. But both of your two graphics cards support dual monitors. Why are you using the 6600GT?

[Ronald Halicki]

I have two graphic cards because each card has digital and analog hook up, I need digital hook ups'.  Also when using the same card the DDC mode only works on one monitor, where using two cards it allows me to disable one of them then calibrate the monitor that does not respond to the DDC control when both are working.

[Rik Wang]

Ok, that makes sense. Most cards nowadays have two digital (DVI-I) ports.

[Ronald Halicki]

I have tried your suggestion but unfortunately it did not work for my problem.  My XP system keeps the profile thats created and so does powerstrip but I lose the DDC setting on my monitor.  The luminance value that DDC sets don not hold.  Any suggestions?

[Rik Wang]

I am not sure what you mean by "DDC setting"? Are you referring to the luminance setting in your monitor OSD? Or your graphics card?

[Ronald Halicki]

From what I understand is when I calibrate the monitors the graphic card controls the luminance settings on the monitor is from a function called 'DDC'.  The monitors stated that this is done with graphic cards that support 'DDC'.   I do believe from all the info I have found that the graphics card I have support "DDC'... but I could be wrong.

[Rik Wang]

Well, all graphics cards made since around 1993 will support DDC. Its been an industry standard for at least 15 years. Probably you (or LaCie) mean DDC/CI, which remains an optional feature on new monitors (but not on graphics cards).

Anyway: it may be simplier if you just confirm what actually happens. Open your monitor OSD menu and look at the brightness value. Then calibrate using your software and look at the brightness value again. Has it changed? Then its DDC/CI.