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Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program List of relevant hardware:
Apple 15.4-inch MacBook Pro MC723LL/A (hi-res antiglare)
Dell 24-inch UltraSharp U2410
Apple LED Cinema Display 27-Inch MC007LL/A
2007 Apple MacBook
I am a software engineer by trade, a photography enthusiast (Canon DSLR with Aperture) and a home video editor (Canon AVCHD with Final Cut Pro) at nights and weekends. I have been using a borrowed Spyder3Pro (S3P for short), which is a reference for this review.
X-Rite is perhaps the largest name in color matching products. It owns PANTONE and makes some of the most respected products. i1 Display Pro (i1D Pro for short) is its latest offering. The hardware is about the size of a memory card reader and smaller than S3P. Unlike S3P, i1D Pro has only the counterweight, lacking suction cups. The counterweight can be moved along the entire cable run. Counterweight is fine for most computer displays, but unusable when calibrating very large HDTV that some people use as a monitor or for HTPC (you will need to hold i1D Pro with your hand over 2 minute calibration run).
All in all, i1D Pro feels substantial and more high-end than S3P. It has a built-in diffuser to measure ambient light and it is capable of calibrating CRT, LCD (CCFL, variations of LED), and even projectors. It has a flare correction feature to compensate for glossy flat screen displays, such as 27" LED Cinema Display.
iD Pro includes i1Profiler software that runs on both Windows (untested) and Mac (tested on 10.7 Lion). Installation was mostly uneventful (and no reboot required), although it did prompt to me update to 1.1.1 (from 1.1.0) and register and activate the product (it otherwise becomes a 30-day trial demo app). The app resembles Apple's Aperture. Coming from S3P and television calibration experiences, I am pretty familiar with the art of display calibration and profiling. So I found the app to be fairly straightforward. Unlike S3P software, i1Profiler can calibrate luminance level as well.
I used advanced mode to calibrate all 4 displays. First, using the app's white patch measurement feature, I set luminance on my displays to as close to 100 cd/m2 as possible (by tinkering with brightness and/or contrast). 100 cd/m2 is below industry's recommended 120-140 range, but I find 120 to be just too darn bright.
The manual and online help are on the inadequate side, so if you are not familiar with profiling, you may want to visit the support section on X-Rite's website to get additional clarification. On the positive side, aside from selecting backlighting type (CCFL and white LED in my case) and luminance level, default recommended values are all good and should be ideal for all but advanced users with discriminating needs.
2 minutes later, I got ICC profiles with better color saturation, more accurate color, more natural whites, and/or deeper black level than S3P (when looking at before and after for various RAW files). The differences are sometimes subtle, but never worse and generally better. Comparing results to Mac OS X's default ICC profiles is much more dramatic, which tends to be very blue with limited color saturation and contrast level. Mac OS X's calibration mode can yield better results than the default, but still dramatically worse than i1D Pro's profiles.
On multi-monitor setup, dragging i1Profiler app from one display to another will let you calibrate other displays. The app can also measure your monitor for uniformity and color accuracy.
That said, the application did crash few times and UI is a bit unrefined here and there. For instance, all important measure button is often hidden, requiring a scroll down. Help icon next to some controls do not reveal any hints of any kind.
A companion piece is i1Profiler Tray, which can run continuously to remind you to recalibrate and uses i1D Pro to adjust for change in ambient light as needed. I am not a fan of ambience compensation, but it does work much better than Apple's built-in feature.
Also included is PANTONE Color Manager software.
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