Useful or not: PANTONE huey Monitor Calibrator

[MacGiver]

I am expecting my recently ordered MBP and wonder if buying the HUEY is worthwhile and most importantly usefull...
What will be the diff between a classic calib and the HUEY calib? Will this help to get a better screen color if i get the known overall yellowish screen (which can be solved calibrating it).
Basically the question is why/when should/shouldn't I buy a HUEY.

 

[doublebullout]

Wirelessly posted (Treo 650: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/hspr-H102; Blazer/4.0) 16;320x320)

Ilve used the ColorSync utility to calibrate my monitor settings and it works fine. I'm always surprised at how much better the display looks afterward. Perhaps if I was an OCD graphics junkie I'd feel differently.

 

[Halsey12]

I just bought the Huey, and it worked amazing on my 23" Cinema Display, but not as good on my MacBook Pro. I am not sure it was meant for LED screens... I am not sure if there is a calibration system out yet that has been tested to work on the LED's.

 

[powerocool]

It works well on regular MBPs but not that well on the LED MBPs ... You will get a weird purple hue that turns green when you change the viewing angle... (this was on a Samsung screen with the yellow issue, and it didn't help fix the problem).

 

[digitalpencil]

I've got a huey, it works great and is cheap! but as powerocool mentioned, it's not very effective in calibrating LED screens (although this is possible, you just need to toggle for ages). But unless you work in print and require your monitors to closely match CMYK profiles for printing then this type of tool really isn't necessary.
Firstly, wait & see if your MBP is affected by the yellow gradient issue as not all (including mine) are. If it is, & you can't live with it, get apple to replace it cause I strongly doubt that this can be fixed by calibration/profiling.
If on the other hand, you work with CMYK printing and are after a monitor calibrator then I can highly recommend the Huey for the best cost/performance i've tried yet.. i'm v.happy with mine

 

[SpaceJello]

I have tried the huey for calibration on a LED MBP. The colors are more vivid afterwards, but I do notice the color gamet to be a bit weird, there is a huge gradient jump in green and red for some reasons even after I tried playing with it for a long time.

Anyone else have the same problem?

 

[ab2650]

Basically the question is why/when should/shouldn't I buy a HUEY.

IMHO, when you should buy a calibrating device is when you are either really anal about color, or your job depends on it. For instance, if you're a photographer and send stuff out to be printed often you probably want to invest in calibration above just "eying it." In my experience, the subtle differences in color rendition will be most apparent with printed work (as opposed to screen to screen).

Your eyes are some amazing tools; they will adjust to color space, brightness and saturation quite easily -- and thus can't really be trusted to compare subtle color difference. With this said, if what you're interested in is getting "the right colors" on your panel I wouldn't worry about the Huey; Just calibrate with software. If you're passing information on to different sources, most notably for print, it makes sense to ensure near-perfect color calibration.

And FWIW, I use a Pantone EyeOne on my 3 different systems/displays.