Here is a laptop with a "relatively nice TN" display. It has relatively smooth gradients but it has a defect: The peak white is yellowish while every other gray tones are bluish (at least they are nearly equally bluish...). I live with effectively 10 bit displays since I care about the display quality but I had this idea in the past that I may skip the calibration and go directly to the profiling. (I still want to do it when my VGA card will be able to output 10 bit from it's framebuffers. I am waiting for the softmod for my HD5850 :) ) Now, that the effective LUT depth is 8 bit as well as the mobile VGA works with 8 bit frame-buffers (and it is a 6+2 bit TN display), I gave it a try. My theory is: - The calibration works with effectively 8 bit precision but it is only a half job. (WP and gamma but no gamut mapping. And the targets are static.) - The CMS based software outputs 8 bit from the frame-buffers as well but some softwares work with higher precision and they dithers the result before they send it to the framebuffers. - A calibration works with fixed targets while a software based CMS converts between source and target profiles (dinamically). -> So, it is theoretically better to skip the calibration, construct a good profile and use smart softwares. (It also saves time: you don't need to wait for the calibration and you need only one profile for everything...) So, I created an XYZ LUT + matrix profile from 912 sample points (measured in Adaptive High-Res mode with black/white drift compensation) in "Ultra" quality mode. (It produced a big ICC file.) I tried to use this profile in different CMS supported softwares, like: Photoshop CS5 ; MPC-HC ; Irfanview, Windows Photo Viewer, Feirefox 4.0b6. (I always use the Relative Colorimetric intent but I also tried to change it to perceptual.) And here comes the problem... The profile works and the different softwares produced the same (or nearly same) results BUT the white point remained untouched! -> And my theory seemed to work! MPC-HC with it's 10 bit pipeline and dithered output produced a reasonable result! I have a relatively smooth gray gradient. But with a yellow tint... (A calibration with the effectively 8 bit LUT would cause some banding or other artifacts. This method is "free" from those problems. ---ok, not perfectly, but it's good enough---) I mentioned it that the peak white is yellowish while the other grays are bluish. Now, the whole grayscale is yellowish. So, it works (there is a white balance correction) but not in the way I want... May be I am the noob here but I thought that the relative colorimetric intent will take care about the white point. So, if the display has a white point around 5500K and the source profile in the tagged image says that it has a white point at 6500K (for example... but theoretically it can be anything...) then the 100% white (like R=G=B=255) will be shown as a 6500K white on my display. (But it's not, it is ~5500K now.) (To be correct: There is a little change in the white point, like 5540K vs 5590K but it's not 6500K or 5000K as it should be...) Did I miss something? Is there a solution? Or do I need to calibrate before the profiling? (t will greatly reduce the number of the available shades which would remain with software dithering...)