Best electronic product reviews : Office Electronics

Flawless Calibration
This is an awesome product, got it today from Amazon and calibrated my 30" HP LP3065 monitor on my Windows 7 64 bit system. Setup and calibration went flawless and more important - I am very satisfied with the outcome of the calibration, colors on this awesome monitor now are even more "deeper" and correct. I would very much recommend this product.

Good color calibrater.
When I first was told I need this for photography school I said what a waste of money. But once I used it I was impressed. It is real easy to use and don't take up alot of space.I will tell anyone looking for a monitor calibrater to get real true color the spyder 3 express is well worth the money.

Wasted Money
I purchased Spyder3express by Datacolor on May 25 2010. I followed all of the instructions and got to the point of running the program. I placed the Spyder on the screen and the program started running. The blue light on back of the Spyder was blinking to show a capture each time the color on the screen changed. At about the 75% point,according to the bar graph, the program froze and nothing I tried would unfreeze it. After talking to to help line numerous times and after downloading the newest version of software, the result was always the same. The technical assistance people said I had a problem that they hadn't seen before. I wrote them that if they couldn't fix the problem to just refund my money and I would ship there hardware back to them. Now it's July 7 2010 and the correspondence has stopped. I am stuck with inoperable hardware and my monitor is not calibrated. My advice would be to look elsewhere for a monitor calibrator.

Won't do Dual Monitors, and minimal customer service
I purchased this product, not realizing that it won't work on dual monitors!! Nothing in the product description on Amazon states this important fact, and there is no real manual or notes on the product box that points this out. The only way to discover is to install AND activate the product, after which I am stuck with the product since the seller will not accept a return.

Customer service was minimal with a short reply of "We're soprry to say you have the "Express" version which won't do dual monitors." I offered to pay the difference and get the Pro, but they did not bother to reply!

I have read more of the reviews of this product here, and I see two other reviewers have had the same problem. One had detailed how to get around the limitation in steps in order to do two monitors; I followed them and have two monitors calbrated but the resulting brightness levels are not the same, although my monitors are identical; while the colors are about the same. I understand from other reviews that the "Express" version is also not really the best product for brighness levels caliberation, and that the Elite is really the way to go. For around 0 you can buy the Adobe Lightroom 3 which is a hell of a product, far more extensive in development and features than the Spyder Elite which costs over 0!

Do NOT purchase if you have a dual monitor set up!
A word of warning for those with dual monitors - I've found out the hard way that this does not calibrate a dual monitor setup, it will only calibrate the primary monitor. I bought the product from 17th Street Photo and their policy, like most places, doesn't allow you to return opened software, and as noted by another review, you have to 'activate' the product before you can use it, which is another strike against me. I'm going to contact the 3rd party reseller and Amazon anyway to try to return it, as the current literature and product description does NOT call this out. Apparently you need to purchase the more expensive pro or elite versions.

I can't speak to how well my screen matches my prints since I haven't had a chance to send any photos to the lab, but the install and calibration of my first monitor was easy. - How well the screen matches your prints should be the gauge of this product, that's what it's for right? And if it does what's advertised? (It should calibrate both displays unless stated otherwise!) It should not be rated based on your difficulty with the 3rd party seller, save that for rating the seller, or if you had to type in a serial number (really?).

5 Stars for install/ease of use
1 Star for not calling out the single monitor limitation (I feel a bit slighted/tricked by them NOT doing this)
3 Stars for value
0 Stars/can't evaluate to actual screen vs. print