I'm interested in running the CHCFR or SpectraCal patterns in a VM. Specifically Parallels on a MacBook. Can I assume faithful RGB? Or, even better, has anyone checked the outputs?

thanks.

+1 Bump, I would also like to know this as I am looking the spectralcal software which is PC only. and I would hate to spend a bunch of money on sensor and software that isn't accurate for calibrating my 30" monitor for photos. I would be running VMware Fusion.

The question is, what settings does the dummy video driver support in the virtual os? If it supports at least 24 bit depth you should be fine. I would not imagine the dummy driver translating the color wrong, so bit depth is all you need to worry about.
As a side note, if you have a new macbook, you may be able to just run windows straight on it. All of the latest macs are intel based and use the very same x86 architecture as all other computers do. Mac's these days are really just expensive generic hardware with OSX tacked on.

Jarrod: Thanks for direction point on 24bit Color depth. I found this VMWARE article which basically states that if the host is set to 24bit then the VM can be set to 24bit. I will quote the article at the bottom.

Yeah I have a Dell Mini 9" laptop running OSX on it, how about that for opposite.. but my main machine is going to be Mac Pro (which can run XP) but I'm switching to OSX for my editing so I want to make sure I can edit on it. I need the laptop for calibrating my Projector though.

I just want to hear from anyone that has had good results before dropping $$$

Quote from VM on color depth
Setting Screen Color Depth in a Virtual Machine

The number of screen colors available in the guest operating system depends on the screen color setting of the host operating system.

Virtual machines support
# 16-color (VGA) mode
# 8-bit pseudocolor
# 16 bits per pixel (16 significant bits per pixel)
# 32 bits per pixel (24 significant bits per pixel)

If the host is in 15-bit color mode, the guest operating system's color setting controls offer 15-bit mode in place of 16-bit mode.

If the host is in 24-bit color mode, the guest operating system's color setting controls offer 24-bit mode in place of 32-bit mode.

If you run a guest operating system set for a greater number of colors than your host operating system is using, you can encounter various problems. In some cases, the colors in the guest are not correct. In others, the guest operating system is not able to use a graphical interface.

Well if you want further reassurance i can tell you i've successfully calibrated a display by using the software on a windows machine but with a mac remoted into it to display the patterns on their monitor. Very hacky but still got good results, used the method as an alternative to loading up a vm. Point being if i can get good results that way i'm quite certain the display will be accurate through a vm.

Edit: Out of curiosity what type of editing are you doing?

Bravo!!! MS RDP or VNC? That would let me use ColorMunki (which is limited to 3 activations) to calibrate more of my machines)...

Photo Editing (MS Expressions, Photoshop, but that could change as I investigate Mac Software) - but basically i have 6 PC's at home and 2 NAS's, and Vista was :mad: ... that I am reducing down to a Mac Pro (Do all machine - leveraging VMware for my test environments (Microsoft Based)), Boxee AppleTV for the bedroom TV, Mac Mini for the Projector, Dell Mini 9 OSX laptop for photobackups to external HD's when traveling or surfing on the couch.. and with Apple I can buy a 5 pack of OS licenses for Ilife/Iwork/OS and upgrade all items at home for the price of 1 Windows 7.0 Upgrade License...Windows 7.0 RC has been a huge improvement of the mistake of Vista, but I'm not going to fork out the Windows 7.0 upgrade licensing costs which require reinstalling all my PC's, plus patching and trying to make stuff work. I am keeping one of my 64Bit AMD boxes for a Game machine and Windows 7.0 but that is because the hardware is worthless used.

Thanks for taking the time to explain that... I might buy another 32GB SSD drive to move my OSX to and re-image XP back on to the stock 16GB just to have my Dell Mini 9" laptop as an RDP calibration tool... That's a great idea!

Well if you want further reassurance i can tell you i've successfully calibrated a display by using the software on a windows machine but with a mac remoted into it to display the patterns on their monitor. Very hacky but still got good results, used the method as an alternative to loading up a vm. Point being if i can get good results that way i'm quite certain the display will be accurate through a vm.

Edit: Out of curiosity what type of editing are you doing?

Vnc, it is more configurable than ms's rdp... but you can try ms's rdp, i believe they also have a mac client app that is free.
Be sure to use all colors for the vnc viewer/client. Only downside is that i used realvnc which cost money for the mac (about $100 for both licenses), but there are free implementations out there other than realvnc. Be careful to avoid those implementations that use dynamic jpeg compression, as jpeg compression alters colors.
And thats cool, i do a lot of photo editing myself. Checkout my site for some work, though most of it is 3d work. Got a site for any of your stuff? Love seeing what others do.

The Mac's have VNC servers built in so you just enable it now, and I use TightVNC as a client but I have to uncheck Compression because you are correct it defaults that way. The MS one works really well on the Mac and it's free, I use it to connect to my HP EX470 NAS running Home Server.

No site up yet as I have about 2TB of photos over the years I have taken but not edited for fear of messing up the originals, and also because I haven't had a calibrated monitor/setup and no time. So that is why I'm working on building a photo process with the help of the O'Reilly book "The DAM Book" but it will be a while. My Mac Pro gets here in 2 days thanks to a refurb deal from Apple. I also got tired of spending $400 bucks each trying to quiet my PC's down, the Mac Pro is silent which will be odd in my office after I move the 2 NAS's out.

Nice Site and work! No 3D for me until I can figure out basic editing...

Vnc, it is more configurable than ms's rdp... but you can try ms's rdp, i believe they also have a mac client app that is free.
Be sure to use all colors for the vnc viewer/client. Only downside is that i used realvnc which cost money for the mac (about $100 for both licenses), but there are free implementations out there other than realvnc. Be careful to avoid those implementations that use dynamic jpeg compression, as jpeg compression alters colors.
And thats cool, i do a lot of photo editing myself. Checkout my site for some work, though most of it is 3d work. Got a site for any of your stuff? Love seeing what others do.

With a software pattern generator, you're also at the mercy of the video hardware. Some graphics chips are not programmable by any means to bypass their built in gamma and color correction -- as they are hard-coded in the silicon.