Asus PA238 Monitor Profile

I was hoping to avoid spending hundreds on calibration equipment so I purchased the Asus PA238Q monitor which boasted 'factory calibration'.

 

However the supplied profile is useless and Photoshop reports that the profile if defective. If you choose the "Use Anyway" option whites will be displayed as deep cream. I've read this is fairly common with various monitors, so people use a work around by choosing sRGB profile or similar....I'd rather not do that.

 

Has anyone got this monitor looking good with the supplied profile?

Edited July 8, 2017 by Gary Holliday

So called "Factory Calibration" is more a marketing sham than anything useful. Calibration is a process by which a device is placed into a desired behavior and then, with devices that differ over time (and a display falls into that category), calibration brings the device back to that desired behavior. IF the factory behavior produces the desired behavior, fine. It usually doesn't. You need to calibrate and profile the display based on your needs, using an instrument. The same software with differing instruments may require differing calibration aim points (settings, targets) and the same instrument using different software will require different settings to produce the same calibration. So you have to use an external product to calibrate a display consistently. Canned display profiles are useless.

100% of sRGB is all you should expect from a monitor that cost less than $1,000.

 

Every monitor has 'factory calibration' and almost none come out of the box looking right. Hopefully the color isn't too wacky, but your description of whites isn't encouraging. If you could borrow a calibration tool, you could set your monitor properly for processing images. It'll take less than 30-minutes, including loading the drivers onto your computer. One of the most important things is to get the brightness calibrated. Most monitors come with a default "showroom" calibrations, which means very bright, so that it'll compete on the showroom floor. That's too bright for image processing.

 

It's ideal to calibrate your monitor regularly; however, if you can borrow a calibration tool and get it right once, then that'll be better off than nothing. Process with no bright light in your studio. I keep blinds closed and let ambient light in through an open door. At night, I've got a desk lamp with a rheostat that I keep low. When you see other peoples images than all almost always too dark, that's probably due to a too bright monitor.

100% of sRGB only tell us about the color gamut! In no way does this say anything else about the attributes of calibration of the display or it's behavior! Further, the sRGB spec defines other attributes than gamut, like the backlight intensity in cd/m^2 which few modern LCD's can hit natively (the spec states 85 Cd/m^2) and the spec defines the ambient conditions around the display. Let alone the color of the backlight (CCT value which define a large range of possible colors). Further still, sRGB is based on a theoretical CRT, circa 1994 using P22 phosphors. You're not going to find that in a modern LCD. Lastly, the percentage of color gamut provided is iffy and somewhat ambiguous in how it is calculated (we can get into specifics if you desire). Bottom line, when you read 100% of sRGB, much like when you read "factory calibrated", you're reading mostly silly marketing hype! Don't fall for such nonsense.

Not getting any help from Asus support, they stand by their profile.

 

 

"The fact that Photoshop says that the file is corrupt, does not mean that it is."

http://msg.asus.com.tw/TMSSAttachment/20177/WTM20170706185917848/WTM20170706185917848_0.png

 

Not so white whites using the Asus profile.

 

 

 

Edited July 9, 2017 by Gary Holliday

Petty easy to check if the profile is valid on this end (using the ColorSync utility) if you upload it. But it's probably not useful anyway, for the reasons explained.