Background: Just started a new job as a software developer for an amazing company. I have at my workstation two beautiful 22” LCD monitors. It just happens, however, that the laptop port replicators we use have one DVI and one VGA connector each; so one monitor is connected via DVI and the other via VGA.
It appears that having these two identical monitors connected over different interfaces screws with the color/brightness/contrast/whatever enough to make a noticeable difference, even after I have reset both back to their default settings. I have tried manually adjusting away the difference, but just can’t seem to reconcile the difference easily (“okay now the whites are the same, but the colors are off…okay now the desktop colors match, but the whites are off…). An exhaustive experimentation would entail something like 256^3 (for the RGB) multiplied by 100^2 (for each of the brightness and contrast). And that is a lot of monitor button clicking.
Without resorting to some expensive monitor calibrator, does anyone have a strategy they use to calibrate two monitors to look the same (e.g., “match the reds first, then the contrast…”)?