| To answer the original question - for those of us with a monitors or two to calibrate, there is no service worth paying for considering the cost of the hardware to do it ourselves. If you're making any money out of your photography, it's well worth it spending around US$60-100 depending on which model you buy and get to calibrate your monitor(s) as often as you want/need to. I paid US$70 for my Spyder2Express and use it on my laptop, and two desktop displays at two week intervals.
The only thing to consider is that the cheaper versions have certain limitations. For example, my Spyder2Express can only manage one monitor at a time, so dual display calibration is out. It also does not include color profiling for printing. For now this is fine until I feel the need to purchase the much more expensive, and more complete colorimeters.
Also - having a new monitor does NOT mean you don't need a colorimeter to calibrate your monitor. My brand new LCD display, calibrated by the good engineers at LG, is super bright/saturated out of the box, not so much after calibrating.
Now if you do your own printing, it's going to cost a lot more to get a dual purpose calibration tool, but again, if you're making money, it should be worth the investment. |