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This article is from July 1, 2003, and is no longer current.

Color Management Tools: GretagMacbeth’s New Eye-One Lineup Spans the Gamut

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Some swear by color management. Others swear at it, partly due to complicated and often idiosyncratic implementations in different applications, but mostly because it doesn’t produce the expected result. By far the most common source of color management failure is inaccurate profiles — either because they were built that way, or because one or other devices in the reproduction chain no longer behaves the way it did when the profile was built. Color management lives or dies by the accuracy of the profiles it uses to record and predict the color rendering behavior of the various devices we use to capture, display, and reproduce color. If your monitor, printer, or scanner doesn’t behave the way its profile says it does, you won’t get good color, so profiling tools play a vital role in making the whole system work.

Many companies offer great tools for calibrating and profiling color devices, but none offer as comprehensive a range of hardware and software solutions as GretagMacbeth. So when GretagMacbeth announces a reworking of its product line, I listen. This time around, the company has revamped the Eye-One line with new software, a new monitor measurement device, new hardware capabilities, new bundles, and new price points, and an incremental yet significant upgrade to its top-of-the-line ProfileMaker Pro package.

In short, GretagMacbeth’s new offerings include something for everyone, from the very basic features anyone who works with color needs to calibrate their display to advanced systems for hardcore color geeks who need industrial-strength profiling tools for presses, with several options that lie somewhere between those extremes. The various Eye-One packages, which with the exception of Eye-One Display are built around the Eye-One spectrophotometer instrument, offer exceptionally easy ways to build high-quality profiles. The difference between the bundles largely boils down to the types of device they can profile.

The three original Eye-One packages — Eye-One Monitor, Eye-One Pro, and the ungainly-sounding Eye-One Pro with Eye-One Match, — have been replaced by four new packages. Eye-One Display calibrates and profiles LCD and CRT monitors. The new Eye-One Beamer includes all the capabilities of Eye-One Display and adds digital projector profiling, plus spot-color and ambient-light measurement. Eye-One Photo offers display and RGB printer profiling as well as spot-color and ambient-light measurement. Eye-One Publish includes all the capabilities of Eye-One Photo, plus CMYK printer profiling and scanner profiling. In addition, upgrades are available to add one package’s capabilities to another’s (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The introductory screen to Eye-One Match software — which ships with all the products except the Pro bundle — lets you select the type of device you wish to profile.

Eye-One Display
Good color management starts with your monitor — if the monitor isn’t correctly calibrated and profiled, it can’t show you accurate color — so the new Eye-One Display package is a great place to start. Eye-One Display replaces the old Eye-One Monitor package, substituting a new colorimeter (also called EyeOne Display) for the more-limited emissive-only spectrophotometer featured in the old package. It also features a new price point of $249.

What’s the difference between a spectrophotometer and a colorimeter? Well, both types of instrument count photons — in other words, they measure light. The difference is the way the photons are categorized. Colorimeters use color filters to separate the incoming light into red, green, and blue components, resulting in three sets of values for each measurement. Spectrophotometers make more detailed measurements; they divide the visible spectrum, which lies between wavelengths of around 380 nanometers to around 700 nanometers, into discrete regions or bands, and count the number of photons that fall into each band. (The EyeOne spectrophotometer divides the visible spectrum into 32 bands, each 10 nanometers wide, so it produces much more detailed measurements than a colorimeter. In color geek terms, colorimeters provide tristimulus data while spectrophotometers provide spectral data — if you want to learn more about the difference, see my column, “Out of Gamut: Why is Color?

Debates on the relative merits of colorimeters and spectrophotometers for monitor calibration quickly spin off into impossibly dense geek-speak, so I’ll spare you. What I can say with confidence is that the new colorimeter seems to do every bit as good a job as the spectrophotometer in direct comparisons on the same monitors (I tested both a CRT and an LCD). More significantly, the new Eye-One Match 2.0 software does a much better job of monitor calibration with either instrument than did the older version, so owners of the original Eye-One instruments will find the software update very much worthwhile. I’ve always found monitor calibration to be the weakest link the GretagMacbeth chain, with a tendency to clip the lowest black levels so that the first eight or so levels all display as the same black. This problem is fixed in Eye-One Match 2.0 and in ProfileMaker 4.1.5, both of which now produce monitor calibrations and profiles that equal those of any other monitor calibration solution I’ve tried that wasn’t specifically designed for a monitor with which it was bundled.

The new Eye-One Display colorimeter is considerably easier to use than the old Eye-One Monitor spectrophotometer, which needed a pair of ungainly adapters to attach to the display, one for CRT and one for LCD. The new, smaller colorimeter has concentric rings of sucker cups that adhere well to CRT screens, and a counterweight molded into the cord that lets you simply drape it over an LCD.

The new version of Eye-One Match features separate routines for LCD and CRT monitors, as well as a very simple “Easy” mode for those who neither want or need to know their monitor’s specific color temperature and gamma. (On the Mac, this auto-mode calibrated my LCD monitor to a reasonable 5000K with a gamma of around 1.9.) More demanding users can select the Advanced mode to choose a specific color temperature and gamma. Either method results in an accurate profile.

The $249 price point is particularly aggressive when you take into account the licensing policy. For $249, you get the right to install the software on an unlimited number of machines — most competing products want you to buy a license for each workstation — so it’s quite practical for a small studio to buy a single Eye-One Display package for all monitor calibration needs.


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  • anonymous says:

    You may need to re-think the content of your articles. Knowing that the sales-schtick of the typical tech sales person may not answer the pracitcal questions of the potential user you may be able to fill the gap with real user information. And those ratings…please qualify them. Attach the names of the people giving the ratings and their contact information. Personally I am tired of knowing the stellar “what” of these tech products. I want to know how…

    DR

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