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This article is from March 21, 2002, and is no longer current.

Under the Desktop: Eye-to-eye with the Eye-One

Many content creators may appreciate the benefits of a color-calibrated workflow, but that awareness is often intellectual, rather than drawn from regular hands-on experience. Instead, color calibration is the good thing that happens to someone else, like the winner of the weekly Lotto.

So I was understandably interested when offered the chance to put GretagMacbeth Holding AG’s Eye-One Pro with Eye-One Match through its paces. This package is a total color workflow solution and calibrates monitors, scanners, and printers.

Our goal was to see if an ordinary human being using ordinary off-the-shelf hardware — someone who’s not a color scientist or an imaging consultant or the prepress guru for a big print house — could improve their color workflow. With a few quibbles, the Eye-One Pro with Eye-One Match proved to be a convenient and effective solution for quality color. Certainly, the result we would expect from a package sporting a $3,090 list price!

Tinkering with Color
The Eye-One Pro with Eye-One Match ships with an assortment of attachments, almost all of which will be needed at one time or another during the calibration process.

The Eye-One Pro device is a spectrophotometer, a unit that measures the wavelength of a color, whether from something that emits colors, like your monitor, or reflects color, such as a printed page (or most things in the world). To measure the latter, it comes with its own built-in light source. GretagMacbeth also sells an entry-level calibrator without the light bulb, the $618 Eye-One Monitor. It only calibrates monitors and can’t be upgraded, the company said.

Along with the handheld USB calibrator come attachments for connecting the sensor to a CRT monitor and a flat-panel display, several plastic holders that help the device accurately read single colors, as well as printed collections of colors called targets (see figure 1). The package includes a reflective target; users can also use an IT8-compliant transparency target available from a number of vendors including Agfa and Eastman Kodak, the company said.


Figure 1: Believe it or not, all this Eye-One Pro paraphernalia fits into the box pictured here with space to spare. The pamphlet that accompanies the package includes a necessary diagram of where and how to stow all the stuff.

The Eye-One is a product that you will want to keep in its box. For example, one of the pieces is the Calibration Plate. It’s more than a handy stand for the sensor — the plate holds a small chip of white paint, the Reference Tile, and is needed whenever you use the Eye-One sensor. Misplacing it, or any of the other parts, could prevent you from calibrating your equipment until you purchase a replacement part. BTW: Losing the Plate is bad and will require you to ship the sensor back to the factory for retuning, the company informed me.

In addition, the company sells the Eye-One Pro sensor separately for $1,545 and you can upgrade to the Eye-One Match software later. Unlike its less-expensive sibling, the Eye-One Pro sensor must be plugged into one of the main USB ports on your computer or a USB hub with a separate power supply. It won’t work when plugged into the keyboard port, for example.

The Eye-One Match software supports Macintosh OS 9.x and OS X, as well as Windows 98 and higher. I tested the product on both Mac OSes.

Facing the Interface
GretagMacbeth has designed a simple, easily understandable platform-independent user interface to the Eye-One’s color calibration. A calibration operation — for either monitor, scanner, or printer — comprises a series of steps, each with its own screen. Some are simple and self-explanatory (see figure 2), while others are more complicated and include an array of small buttons to provide help.


Figure 2: The Eye-One Match interface is big on illustrations and short on text in its effort to make the calibration process simple. My guess: the Eye-One engineers believe that either a picture is worth a thousand words (or at least a couple of hundred), or content creators don’t read instructions. Maybe, both.

The company obviously expects that users will find the operation so simple that there’s little need for written documentation, nor even documentation on the software installer disc. Almost all the information a user will need for each stage of the process, or more accurately receive, can be found on the screen.

In practice, I found the interface initially confusing, perhaps because it is so simple. There were moments that I wished for some printed documentation. Things were clearer the second time around, especially after I studied all the Help fields as I should have in the first place.

For example, users don’t initiate a step or a test by clicking a start button. Rather, each test is initiated automatically when you hit the Forward button on the previous step. (To me these arrows are Backward and Forward, although the Eye-One Match insists that the latter is called “Next.” In any case, there’s no label.)

Sometimes you need to click the button on the sensor, and at other times the sensor will read the colors on its own. There were moments that I figured that the program was doing something, but I was unsure of its status since feedback was limited.

(Late one evening, I briefly wondered if the sensor was working right. From GretagMacbeth’s site I downloaded a diagnostic utility that let me check whether the device is functioning within its specification. It was.)

These are minor points. The software is easy to use and understandable, and it provides a common interface to both Mac and Windows users.

On the positive side, Eye-One Match’s built-in intelligence can also prevent screw-ups. I discovered that the sensor functions as a dongle — the software won’t work until it senses the calibrator. That means there’s no worry that someone could accidentally overwrite a valid profile while just checking out the program (a reason to unplug the sensor when not in use).


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