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When the New Spyder Proved to Be an Antique: A Tale of Digital Darkroom Archaeology

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A serene Nordic lake landscape where calm water reflects a soft, cloudy sky. In the right foreground, a large, moss-covered granite rock reaches into the water. Thin reeds stick out of the water, and the dense forest in the background is illuminated by the warm glow of the evening sun.
May evening peace – where granite rocks meet mirror-calm water and the soft light of a spring evening. The image was edited using a new scene-referred workflow in the Darktable software. (Click on the image to view it in larger size.
It all started with curiosity and twelve large aluminum prints. I was preparing a gallery exhibition for France and decided to have my photos printed on elegant Alu-Dibond aluminum panels through the Saal Digital printing service.

The Color Calibrator, aka Colorimeter #

Because printing on aluminum is a major investment both artistically and financially, I wanted to play it safe. I downloaded the service’s official ICC printer profiles for soft-proofing. The purpose of this process is to simulate on-screen how the final physical print will look. For this preview to be reliable, the monitor must display colors completely neutrally. This is where calibrators, or colorimeters, come into play. A colorimeter is a small measurement device placed on the screen’s surface that measures the wavelengths of light emitted by the display and compares them to international color standards. The calibrator creates a correction profile that forces the monitor to display colors exactly as they are in the file. Without calibration, you risk a photo that looks gorgeous on screen turning out too dark, green, or magenta when printed. So, I headed to Rajala Pro Shop, a well-known local photography specialist retailer, to buy a new calibrator.

However, both in-store and online, I encountered a strange phenomenon. There were two different price tiers available, and the cheaper model carried the simple name Datacolor Spyder without the familiar version number, such as X or X2. When I asked the store staff about the generational differences or what technology this generic base model was built on, nobody could give me an answer. I decided to take the device anyway, as its sleek retail packaging promised full support for Windows 11 environments as well as modern OLED, Mini LED, and Apple XDR display technologies.

Digital Archaeology Through Open Source #

Back in my home studio, however, a digital odyssey began that quickly turned into a technical detective story. Since my darkroom runs on a modern Linux environment—specifically Ubuntu 24.04 LTS—I bypassed the manufacturer’s proprietary Windows installers. Instead, I launched DisplayCAL, a monitor calibration software that uses the industry-standard open-source ArgyllCMS color management engine as its backend.

I wanted to check what was happening at my computer’s USB port when the device was connected. I opened a terminal and ran the lsusb command, which lists all connected USB devices along with their raw electronic identifiers. The response that flashed on the screen was a shock:


Bus 001 Device 008: ID 085c:0a0b ColorVision, Inc. Spyder2

This Hardware ID isn’t a guess made by the operating system; it’s a digital fingerprint burned onto the microchip at the factory. The manufacturer ID 085c refers to a company named ColorVision, Inc.—a name that hasn’t been used commercially since 2007, when the company was rebranded as Datacolor. Meanwhile, the product ID 0a0b confirmed that the device was physically a Spyder 2 generation model, originally released around 2004.

The final and undeniable technical proof came from the ArgyllCMS initialization program, which crashed immediately with the following error message:


arun: Information: Spyder 2 requires a firmware upload
to the PLD before use.
arun: Error: spyder2: Firmware 'spyd2PLD.bin' not found!

This message reveals something about the hardware architecture that no software update can hide. From a manufacturing history standpoint, the Spyder 2 is an exceptional device because it lacks internal, permanent Flash memory for its firmware. Upon booting, the device is a completely empty shell that requires its firmware to be uploaded from the computer via the USB bus to the device’s programmable logic device (PLD) every single time it is powered on. Every newer model starting from the Spyder 3 features internal Flash memory and never performs this external upload process. The device was literally screaming to the software that it was a two-decade-old Spyder 2.

Is the Datacolor Spyder NOS (New Old Stock)? #

How is this kind of Frankentech even possible in 2026?

International forums hint that this is a global phenomenon. When a manufacturer or distributor is left with large quantities of legacy components (New Old Stock), they aren’t always scrapped. Instead, they can be housed in new plastic enclosures, stripped of version numbers, and sold as a budget product line. In the case of this Datacolor Spyder, new drivers written for Windows and Mac environments handle this firmware upload seamlessly in the background, leaving the consumer believing they have purchased a brand-new device.

However, compatibility with a driver written for a modern operating system does not translate to physical performance—you cannot upgrade the laws of physics with code.

  1. First of all, the color filters in these legacy devices are based on organic films made of gelatin and dyes. They age, fade, and degrade chemically over time just like old film, even if the device has been sitting in an unopened box.

  2. Secondly, the hardware’s electronic noise floor is so high that it cannot distinguish the perfect black levels required by OLED displays from its own electronic noise, resulting in crushed shadows (loss of dark detail).

  3. Thirdly, modern HDR and XDR displays reach peak brightness levels of up to 1600 nits (candela per square meter). Back in the Spyder 2 era, monitors illuminated at around 100 to 200 nits. When this legacy sensor is placed in front of a 1600-nit light source, its photodiodes saturate—effectively blinding it completely—which causes the bright highlights to clip into a flat line.

The Distributor’s Response #

In their response, the distributor’s representative tried to put a positive spin on things, arguing that the device worked fine for them on Windows 11. However, my request for an official technical whitepaper went completely unanswered. I took the device back to the retailer’s Mikonkatu store in Helsinki, where the situation was handled gracefully: I managed to exchange this historical Frankentech relic for a high-quality Hoya 77mm circular polarizing filter.

The greatest irony of the whole story only came to light once I got back to my desk. A closer look at my current monitor—an ASUS ProArt PA279 model from a 2022 production batch—revealed that its factory calibration was already so accurate out of the box that no further color profiling was necessary. The only thing that needed manual adjustment to match Saal Digital’s profile was the monitor’s backlight brightness. The modern display handled the heavy lifting on its own, rendering the entire colorimeter circus completely pointless.

While the hardware runaround was quite a lesson in physics and history, it pushed me leaps and bounds ahead on the software side. This process forced me to abandon old image-processing paradigms and dive deeper into the open-source world. In my next blog post, I’ll share where this path eventually led: to a modern, physics-based, scene-referred workflow in Darktable. I’ll explain how the software’s new Sigmoid and Color Calibration modules work, and how they extract every ounce of performance from my Nikon D800 RAW files without the need for outdated hardware.

Stay tuned!

The Lesson of the Story #

If you’ve been considering purchasing a colorimeter, I highly recommend staying far away from the base Datacolor Spyder model. Its significantly lower price is built on misleading marketing and deceptive packaging that tricks consumers under the guise of software compatibility. The newer, true current-generation model from the same manufacturer is called the Datacolor Spyderpro, which costs nearly double compared to this base model.

References and Fact-Checking #

  1. Deterioration of organic color filters (Deterioration of gelatin filters): Documentation from the DisplayCAL development community and industry experts confirms that older colorimeters (such as Spyder generations 1–5) use gelatin-based color filters. Unlike modern glass-based filters, these react with air and moisture over time, altering their spectral response (color accuracy).
  1. Noise floor and OLED display measurement constraints (Noise floor and dark current): International Electrotechnical Commission standards dictate that when measuring emissive displays that produce deep blacks, such as OLED panels, the device’s signal must be at least ten times greater than the measurement device’s own noise floor (dark level / noise floor). In legacy electronics, this noise floor is too high to distinguish the actual signal.
  1. Luminance saturation and the “nit” explanation (Dynamic range and sensor saturation): Colorimeter sensors are optimized for a specific dynamic range. When a legacy sensor designed for the CRT era—where luminance hovered around 100–200 nits (cd/m²)—is exposed to the intense, localized brightness of modern Mini-LED and Apple XDR displays (up to 1600 nits), the sensor saturates. This causes signal clipping, destroying tonal distinction.
  1. Spyder 2 architecture firmware upload (PLD firmware upload): The source code documentation for ArgyllCMS and DisplayCAL demonstrates that a device with the hardware ID 085c:0a0b requires the spyd2PLD.bin file to be uploaded from the computer via the USB bus before the device’s programmable logic device (PLD) can activate. This conclusively confirms the architectural age of the hardware.
  • Source: Argyll Color Management System (ArgyllCMS) - oeminst source documentation.