NEC Australia has announced SpectraView II, a new release of the colour calibration software package developed for its professional displays.

NEC SpectraView II is designed for users in the graphic design, image analysis and CAD/CAM industries, as well as soft-copy clinical viewing in the medical field.

The SpectraView II system, available for Mac OS and Windows, uses a colorimeter to take colour measurements of the display screen during calibration. The software analyses these measurements and sends colour adjustment commands directly to the display monitor, allowing the full colour resolution and fidelity of the system to be maintained.

Features of SpectraView II when used with an NEC LCD display include:

· Three internal 12-bit look-up tables (LUTs), which allow precise adjustments to be made to the display's tone response curve with minimal reduction to the number of displayable colours;

· Fully automated calibration, which makes adjustments directly in the display hardware, allowing optimal settings to be configured without any user interaction;

· Multiple calibration sets, which enable quick and easy switching between different calibration settings without the need to re-calibrate the display;

· Calibrated display information, which shows the results of the calibration, including the measured colour gamut, grayscale colour tracking, Delta-E and luminance values;

· Calibration status validation, whereby SpectraViewII queries the system to see if any controls have changed since the last calibration and restores to the previous calibrated state

· Monitor locking, which allows the On Screen Display (OSD) controls to lock the monitor once calibrated to prevent accidental or unauthorized adjustments;

· Monitor profiling, which allows the monitor to be automatically profiled after calibration, generating a highly accurate ICC/ColorSync colour profiles; and

· Colorimeter function, which allows direct measurements to be taken by the colour sensor and the results displayed in a variety of formats.

The compatible MultiSync displays are wide-gamut LCDs featuring ColorComp technology, which reduces LCD uniformity errors by compensating for differences in colour/grayscale and luminance across the screen area. Their advanced backlight technology enables the displays to produce up to 98 percent coverage and 107 percent the gamut size of the AdobeRGB colour space.

Select models incorporate in-plane switching (IPS) module technology - minimizing off-angle colour shift, and clearer black tones in dark-coloured images.

NEC SpectraView II software brings improved colour accuracy and support for the X-Rite ColorMunki spectrophotometer on Mac OS and Windows. Developed for large-volume users, a Linux version of SpectraView II will be made available in the near future.

SpectraView II is available as a bundle with select NEC professional displays and combined with a professional, light shielding hood. Existing customers with a supported NEC display and colour sensor device can also purchase the SpectraView II software separately at an estimated street price of $159.