Colour Calibration Issues

[Espeon]

Hey,

So I've been having some issues with colour calibrating my monitor and I was wondering if anyone had any good ideas on how to best approach colour calibration?

Basically, the monitor I'm using is my friend's old flatscreen TV - which may be causing issues within itself, as it's not strictly speaking a computer monitor - and this came displaying colours highly inaccurately.

After tinkering with the settings on the TV itself, I managed to find "red only", "blue only" and "green only" settings, so between these and the colour calibration tool which was inbuilt to Windows, I was kind of able to get something vaguely workable.

For those who care, this is what I did in more detail:

Basically to try and get the colours as accurate as possible, I assumed that during red-only mode, #FF0000 and #FFFFFF should display identically, and so on so forth for #00FF00 and #0000FF compared with #FFFFFF for green and blue respectively.

So here's what I did in order:
1. Use the windows colour calibration tool to do it best by eye.
2. Create a garish web page to load from my dropbox which basically looks like the French Flag, with a base of green so that the colours #FF0000, #00FF00 and #0000FF were adjacent to a block of white, #FFFFFF.
3. Fine tune the monitor settings so that when in Red-only, Blue-only and Green-only mode, the colour in question displayed identically against the white.
4. Keep flicking back and forth between the colour modes until no further adjustments are needed for this.

Either way, I'm not convinced that I'm correctly colour calibrated, since black-text on a bright red background tends to bleed a lot, so that the black text is often obscured.

It could be to do with my brightness and contrast at this point but, I'm really not sure what best to try, outside of buying one of those gadgets which will help with colour calibration.

Was wondering if anyone had any bright ideas about this so that I can draw into my computer again? :(

 

[Superbird]

Are you sure it's not an issue of the screen resolution being too low for the monitor to comfortably display? IIRC that can cause the appearance of blurring/bleeding.

And I doubt it's the actual problem, but what kind of display cable are you using - VGA, DVI, Component, HDMI? Have you tried swapping out the cable to see whether or not it's the issue?

 

[Espeon]

Are you sure it's not an issue of the screen resolution being too low for the monitor to comfortably display? IIRC that can cause the appearance of blurring/bleeding.

And I doubt it's the actual problem, but what kind of display cable are you using - VGA, DVI, Component, HDMI? Have you tried swapping out the cable to see whether or not it's the issue?

Hey, thanks for replying!

Relating to your first point, I'm not actually sure! The monitor resolution is 1920 x 1080 px, but I'm not actually sure what the dimensions of the screen are in cm/inches etc... I could try to measure it but I only have 30cm rulers so, this method may prove to be a little inaccurate. :'D I wasn't aware that this could case the appearance of bleeding though so, that's good to know!

EDIT: Apparently after finding the model number, the TV is meant to be 32", though Amazon also quotes the diagonal dimension as being 31"/80cm. Link to product on Amazon.co.uk.

As for the type of cable I'm using, it's an HDMI cable. I haven't tried swapping the cable, but having used these types of cables before, I don't think the issue lies with the input. However, I do have an old VGA cable kicking around at my parents' home, so I might have a go with this later on and see what happens when I next go back to visit in mid-February.