# Questions on color calibration



## flarimeki38 (Nov 4, 2020)

I have a few questions and confusions on color calibration.
When you calibrate a monitor/television/projector connected to a PC, you can adjust the color settings on the physical display and within the OS. This leads me to believe that calibrating color for one piece of hardware (say, your PC) will not carry over to another piece of hardware (like an Nvidia Shield), since they are outputting different color profiles. Is this true? Are there not just standardized color profiles that are outputted across various pieces of hardware and software? And if there are, why does that not seem to be standardized on computer OSes?
Thanks.


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## Da Wiz (May 8, 2019)

Typically you can adjust some parameters with Windows. Video processing systems may also have vendor-specific color adjustments that are saved in that video system and are not shared. And as you mentioned, the monitor may also have on-board adjustments. So there are 3 separate places you may find adjustments for video. Typically, Windows and the video driver subsystem should be set to defaults for TV or Computer video. You want to calibrate the monitor first. The easiest way to do that is to drive it with a video pattern generator or a disc player that outputs the same resolution as the monitor (i.e. HD or UHD) and an appropriate disc with test patterns (assuming you don't own a video pattern generator). Calibrate the monitor as best you can. When you reconnect to the computer, there MAY be some small tweaks you can do in the driver software (vendor menu) or via Windows. If your source is TV programming and movies, you want to calibrate to Rec.709 standards for HDTV and to UHD standards in Rec. 2020/DCI/P3 standard used for UHD video.


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