Display calibration and remote storage.

Part III appears here.

I use an Eye-One colorimeter to profile the two Dell 2209WA displays attached to my desktop HackPro and used the same tool to calibrate the MacBook Air’s display.

Software: As the MBA has no DVD drive, I imported the software for the Eye-One from the User->Applications directory on the HackPro by networking the MBA with the HackPro. All you need is in that one directory – there are no additional files to be found in the Library->Application Support directory.

The Eye-One is attached in the usual way.

Electing the ‘Laptop’ option in the software, the whole process took maybe 5 minutes, with the profile being stored automatically as the default by Eye-One, visible in System Preferences->Displays:

How do the images compare? First it has to be noted that the MBA’s display is far more sensitive to color changes with off center viewing than the 21.5″ Dell. That’s hardly surprising, given the large screen size of the latter. Second, the Eye-One software in Laptop mode does not provide for brightness adjustment so when lining up the two in the picture below I had to turn down the MBA’s brightness a couple of notches to match things up.

The MBA compared with the Dell 2209WA display.

Bottom line: You might not want to use the MBA for critical color matching but this quick and easy calibration gets me very close indeed to what I see on the calibrated Dell displays attached to my desktop Mac.

Remote storage: Users of services like MobileMe or Dropbox gain access to copious amounts of ‘cloud’ storage. Is this a cheap answer to significantly expanding storage of the MBA, given this netbook’s small internal storage drive?

If you want to store lots of small files then this is certainly a workable solution. Indeed, I use it for spreadsheets with both Excel and Numbers as it allows me to access a spreadsheet from any one of a number of computers. With MobileMe’s iDisk feature the remote storage is accessed like any disk drive.

But the situation is not so good with large RAW picture files. My internet service measures at 10mb/s download and 1.4 mb/s upload; in practice, it takes me almost a minute to upload one RAW file from the Panasonic G1 to the iDisk at MobileMe, and maybe 10 seconds to download it. That’s pretty slow. You can use this in a pinch but will burn up lots of battery power and waste a lot of time. A small USB self-powered external hard drive is, at present, a far better solution. Take a look at CarBak.

In Part V I look harder at heat management, the bugaboo of most of Apple’s hardware designs.