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Issue 4.3

REVIEW

MoniTOR

Issue: 4.3 (January/February 2006)
Author: Norman Palardy
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,404
Starting Page Number: 9
Article Number: 4304
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.mosquitosw.com/

Full text of article...

MoniTOR is a tool you can use to test the calibration of a monitor. For many people this won't mean a lot, but for those that require it, it's valuable information to make sure that your monitor is displaying accurate colors and that the geometry is correct.

Initial appearances of the disk image (DMG) are that this is a cleanly packaged and very useful application. The DMG has a nice appearance and simple installation instructions for the application. The What's New document does list all the restrictions that are present in Demo mode.

There are some small glitches in the demo mode that I noticed. None render the application unusable, but they are indications that the application has some rough spots. For instance, while the test should consume the entire screen, until I switched to another application and then back to MoniTOR the menu bar continued to appear. This makes some of the tests hard to tell if they are working properly (like the full screen color test to identify bad pixels). Small items but annoying.

More annoying was when I switched to the Geometry test, switched to BBEdit (for writing this) and back. Doing this I would be shown the full screen color test and would have to click the various tabs to switch back to the appropriate test.

There is no mention of whether the Video Demos should or should not function but it is eventually mentioned in the manual why this would not work. The options are enabled even though a sample video is not present. It would be good if this was disabled if there is no video. This is similar for other options that are not available in demo mode like the color choices on the Colors tab.

MoniTOR does include reasonable documentation on the use of the program, as well as a discussion of various color models found in the computer business. It also describes what you might use each test for when calibrating and testing a monitor.

While MoniTOR is a reasonably well done program, the tool could include additional calibration tests in order to be considered a necessity for anyone having to calibrate monitors. The color tests could include the standard color bars and grey scale settings along with some explanation of how to adjust a CRT monitor so your color is reasonably accurate. This might include setting the white point for a monitor as well as things like the brightness and contrast.

End of article.