M1 Display All Grey After Screen Calibration

[Pressure]

That's not what I said. There is good reason to calibrate a monitor once and for all. Which is why it is great that Apple is doing it so accurately at the factory. But you destroy this very color accuracy by recalibrating it five times a year. Unless you think the colors really change that much over time? If you care about color accuracy, you should avoid things that mess up color accuracy. You may want to raise accuracy by recalibrating, but you likely achieve the opposite.

You should realise you need to calibrate for different profiles or workflows, whether you are targeting print, web or film. They all have different requirements, like white point and brightness (nits).

Brightness, white point and color accuracy do drift over time as the RGB elements that make up LEDs slowly burn out. That's why your monitor slowly gets dimmer over time.

It's a profile. You can change between them. You don't change the default, less accurate, standard calibration profile by making a new profile.

 

[Gudi]

It's a profile. You can change between them. You don't change the default, less accurate, standard calibration profile by making a new profile.

Makes no sense to me. Sure different targets have different requirements, but one and the same display either shows the correct color or not. I can switch between different color profiles without calibrating the screen for each. And while you make an additional profile and don't change the default, you can ever only use one. So in practice you do lose all the accuracy of the previous calibration. Frequent recalibration can only improve color accuracy when indeed there is a noticeable color shift of the entire display every three months.

 

[Lihp8270]

Makes no sense to me. Sure different targets have different requirements, but one and the same display either shows the correct color or not. I can switch between different color profiles without calibrating the screen for each. And while you make an additional profile and don't change the default, you can ever only use one. So in practice you do lose all the accuracy of the previous calibration. Frequent recalibration can only improve color accuracy when indeed there is a noticeable color shift of the entire display every three months.

Colour is only accurate at a certain brightness for example.

If you have a workflow where your work is displayed at different brightnesses you need a calibration at each of these points for example.

 

[mr_roboto]

You act as if the difference between Intel and ARM iMacs is just a faster CPU. The entire boot sequence and security architecture is new. The graphic cores and drivers are no longer from Nvidia. Every single line of code in the OS was at least recompiled, if not rewritten. Even if your (Late-2015 or younger) 5K iMac already had a P3 color gamut and not sRGB, there’s no reason to expect an old calibration tool would work exactly the same. At best you ruin the factory calibration, at worst you lock yourself out of the computer for good.

You act as if listing some differences between M1 and Intel Macs is a compelling argument. It isn't, because color calibration hardware and software doesn't have to care about any of that.

Calibration pucks are merely measurement devices. Calibration software uses macOS APIs to display specific colors on screen, then asks the puck to measure the result. Do this on enough different colors and you can map out the display's response curves, then create calibration data which can later be used by macOS to compensate for the display's inherent error.

That's what calibrated ColorSync profiles are: data derived from measurements. They do not contain code. They're not tied to Arm, or Intel, or Nvidia, or Apple G13 (the M1 GPU).

Claiming that people are fools to use pre-M1 calibration hardware with M1 Macs is very dumb. A display is still a display, and the job of measuring its deviance from perfect color accuracy has not fundamentally changed just because Apple transitioned Macs to Apple Silicon.

In fact, when I googled some relevant terms, I found out that at least one significant supplier of calibration pucks (not the one the OP has) released a software update to support M1 Macs which requires Rosetta. And that's fine. ColorSync doesn't care; as long as the profile data is good everything will work perfectly.

 

[Gudi]

You act as if listing some differences between M1 and Intel Macs is a compelling argument. It isn't, because color calibration hardware and software doesn't have to care about any of that.

If the platform isn't an issue, then why even mention that this happened with an M1 and never before for multiple years on Intel iMacs? We don't know what happened, but we have probable cause to assume that it has something to do with the many changes that go along with the ARM transition. And it should also surprise nobody, if the exact same problem occurs again on an M1 iMac.

 

[mollyc]

This happened to me when I got my M1 earlier this year. The M1 needs Monterey 12.3 or higher to work properly with the Spyder. I calibrated my computer when getting it and didn't realize that I was on 12.2 at the time. I was able to see enough of the screen through faint patches to connect to my AppleTV and then used ATV as a screen mirror and deleted the bad profile.

Admittedly I have not tried to calibrate again since upgrading my OS, but I also made an admin profile that I can log into for emergencies like this, because the log in screen always came up with no issue after a reboot, so I knew the screen itself still worked. It was just the bad profile that needed to be deleted.

https://spyder-support.datacolor.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403402666002-macOS-12-Monterey-and-Apple-Silicon-M1-system-support

 

[mr_roboto]

If the platform isn't an issue, then why even mention that this happened with an M1 and never before for multiple years on Intel iMacs? We don't know what happened, but we have probable cause to assume that it has something to do with the many changes that go along with the ARM transition.

No, we don't. You're starting with an assumption that it must be related to the Arm transition, then trying to interpret everything you see as evidence for that assumption. This is not how actual software and hardware engineers debug things. (Well, it's not how good ones do it, anyways.)

The reason honkin mentioned it happened with M1 is obvious: they're reporting their experiences. That's a valid thing for them to do.

Do those experiences mean the bug is due to the Arm transition? We don't know. It's understandable and human to interpret coincidences as connections, but that's a classic logical fallacy. It's just a hint, it doesn't prove anything. Often, these early surface-level observations which seem like they should be significant turn out to be meaningless. That's the way debugging goes.

honkin also mentioned that this only happened the third time they calibrated their M1 iMac's display. Everything worked fine the first two times. So we know your half-baked, baseless idea that somehow Apple Silicon is so different that an old display calibrator can't possibly work is just wrong.

I'd say a much more plausible explanation is that between the time when the OP did their first two calibrations and now, OP installed a macOS update which triggered the problem. This could be a bug Apple introduced, or it could even be a bug Apple fixed. (Sometimes, application software either accidentally or intentionally depends on buggy OS behavior, and when the bug goes away, the app breaks.)

But that's still just a guess. I think it's a better and more informed guess, but I'm not going to pretend it's truth.

This happened to me when I got my M1 earlier this year. The M1 needs Monterey 12.3 or higher to work properly with the Spyder. [...]

https://spyder-support.datacolor.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403402666002-macOS-12-Monterey-and-Apple-Silicon-M1-system-support

This one's interesting, but I suspect it's not quite the same thing - the support article is talking about a problem specific to the 14"/16" M1 MacBook Pro internal displays. That's significant because these are Apple's first built-in miniLED LCD displays with thousands of backlight zones rather than a single global backlight. I have no doubt that this new tech presents some new and exciting challenges for post-factory calibration. I also would not be surprised if Apple shipped the hardware before ColorSync was fully ready to support third party calibrator workflows with these displays.