ColorMunki Photo - Monitor, Printer & Projector Profiler
by X-Rite
|
List Price: Our Price: $449.00 You Save: $50.99 (10%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Buy Used: from $380.00 (click here) Category: Digital Camera See more product details |
|---|
Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of ColorMunki Photo - Monitor, Printer & Projector Profiler
Customer Review: Great With the Right Configuration - Recommended w/Caveats
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
We do a lot of photo and printing work making training material, promotional items, and customized products for our small business, so we were extremely happy to try the "ColorMunki Photo Profiler". I had been using the Pantone huey MEU101, which worked well but lacked some of the advanced features of the ColorMunki.
The ColorMunki was fairly easy to install and calibrate to the monitor, but I quickly ran into problems trying to create working profiles to my general purpose inkjet (Brother MFC-6490CW) and laser (Okidata C3200N) printers with Corel Pant Shop Pro Photo X2. A call to customer service was answered by a fairly pleasant and knowledgeable tech, but ultimately was unsuccessful in making either of them match. This was a good excuse to buy a used Epson Stylus Photo 2200 Inkjet Printer, which the ColorMunki tech suggested would work with my configuration, and she was right. I also installed it on a PC with Adobe Photoshop CS3 and had equally good results to the Epson printer.
Pros:
+Well designed hardware, including the ability to self calibrate
+Easy to use, non intrusive software
+Great color accuracy when correctly configured (see "Cons")
+Good Customer support
+Good tutorial videos
Cons:
-Compatibility problems with some printers
-Overly simplistic documentation
-Expensive to calibrate matching profiles (printer paper and ink)
Overall this is a great solution if you have the right configuration of software and hardware, but can be frustrating (being both time consuming and expensive) if you don't. I recommended contacting ColorMunki tech support to see if this is going to work for you in advance.
Recommended, with the caveats listed above.
Customer Review: Great first step if you're trying to get accurate colors
Summary: 4 Stars
I used to do "trial and error" color calibration...print a few things, adjust colors and so on. After a while, this got so frustrating (and expensive, due to the wasted prints) that I decided to take the plunge and buy a real calibration tool. No regrets...what I see on the monitor is much closer to what I print, and the whole calibration process (which I guess I was a little scared of) was no big deal. Just a few minutes every so often, and you've got dramatically better results. Highly recommended.
Two things I'm not thrilled with, though. One is that printer profiles don't seem to work properly with my Epson R2880 printer. The calibration process works, but when I try to use the calibrated results, prints come out splotchy and distorted. This might very well be some sort of problem with Epson's printer drivers, but for now, I'm stuck with standard profiles.
Other thing I'm not thrilled about is the license model Colormunki uses. I have a laptop and two desktop PCs, and my laptop gets connected to multiple monitors depending on whether I'm home, in the office or on the road. I can understand that Colormunki wants me to buy multiple copies of their product, but I didn't understand there was a limit to the number of PC/monitor combinations I could use with their product. I'm sure it was in the fine print somewhere, but it took me by surprise that I couldn't simply calibrate as many computers as I might want with a single copy of their product.
UPDATE - January 2010
Still using the Munki with good results and the two problems I mentioned have been fixed. The problem with my R2880 was apparently Epson's and was corrected by maintenance in their drivers. The licensing issue, as others pointed out, was fixed by the Munki folks. I've since added a 27" iMac and a new Epson 7900 to my collection, and not only has the Munki helped me calibrate each one optimally, they are also much more like one another so I can view or print from any system to any printer with no surprises.
Customer Review: It's a hit and a miss.
Summary: 4 Stars
I've owned this product for several weeks now. I have been trying to get it to work with my desktop computer. I have it connected to a 46" Samsung tv. I installed the software and created a profile, but I keep getting an error message "can not set the LUTS". I finally tracked down a solution on Xrites website, but their solution didn't work. So for the past few weeks now I have been chasing the problems to get this thing to work. Yesterday I finally decided I was going to return the product, but I wanted to make sure that it wasn't a problem with my computer first. So I installed the program on my laptop. I calibrated the screen and everything worked out just fine. So after seeing success on the laptop, I decided to reinstall the program on the desktop. I recalibrated the monitor and this time I did not get the "can not set the LUTS" error message. I thought to myself "success at last", but that was short lived. When I finally got out of the program and opened up a photo of a portrait I took, it looked like the people had an Incredible Hulk tan. So I doubled checked the colors against a pic of a 18% grey card and it was a mint green color. So the problem is obviously with the communication with the video card. I just don't see why it is having problems with the video card. Both the laptop and desktop are running ATI video cards and both are running the Catalyist Control Center. Both systems are Windows 7 and have AMD processors. I will find out the answer to this problem even if I have to reinstall Windows 7 on my desktop.
So far the product has been a hit and a miss. The colors on the laptop are wonderful. Too bad I never intended to use this product on the laptop. I don't do any editing on the laptop. Plus people like to see the pictures on a large screen, hench the 46" tv. I will try tommorrow to connect the tv to my laptop and calibrate it to see if I get the Hulk tan again. I will update this review with either a success or failure, and upon success I will give a solution.
Customer Review: Great results in that price range
Summary: 4 Stars
Quick and dirty what I do and don't like in this little device:
The most important positive thing about it is... that it works. Which only at first may seem to be obvious but from my previous experience with different color calibrators it not always is so. And I don't mean that you can't calibrate the monitor using them. You can, but it closer resemble engineering process than quick and painful task you can do every other Monday to make sure your monitor profile is up to date. With ColorMunki the bundled software does that job perfectly. It checks your monitor's current setting, asks you to adjust contrast or brightness level if needed (usually you have to set them during initial calibration, then they don't change that much if you don't touch them) and then does it's job in a matter of seconds. No unneeded options (those are hidden if you really want to play), just few clicks and your monitor is done.
What I do not like about it? The most annoying thing is the device's design. It's built as a rotating ring/button/circle inside bigger enclosure. You're supposed to turn the whole inside ring between different steps of calibration process. The problem is that one side of that ring actually works as a button activating currently selected function of the device. I find it very difficult to turn the ring without pressing the button. You have to constantly remember about it otherwise the software will try to start it's job while the device is obviously not ready causing errors to pop up. The other thing I've notice is that it's very important to reset any possible monitor settings to the factory defaults, otherwise you may get strange results. That thing was actually mentioned on the X-Rite website's but I've read that after I was done with the job.
In the end it took me less that 45 minutes to calibrate all four monitors I have. Considering price - well worth it.
Customer Review: Pluses and Minuses
Summary: 4 Stars
I've used this to color calibrate my monitor, but not my printer yet.
This product has some pluses and minuses. I bought it because my new laptop has an RBG LED "wide gamut" display. The colors have a lot of pop, but they're oversaturated - this was mostly a concern because pictures of regular people with regular looking skin would end up looking "deeply sunburned". The red in their face would be ridiculously overdone, and it looked bad and unrealistic (they didn't actually look that way in person).
I wanted to use my monitor for photo editing, so I bought ColorMunki to calibrate it.
It has improved that red sunburned thing, and the colors it chose have tended to be good - when viewed on other monitors, about 50% of other monitors would have colors stronger, and 50% weaker, which is exactly what I wanted.
But there are 2 substantial drawbacks -
1. The color profile only gets applied to certain, color managed application. And often you have to turn on color management to get that. So the more accurate colors are used in photo editing and photo viewing applications (if you turn it on), but not for the photo thumbnails, or stuff like games.
2. While I've found the performance of the tool with regular colors to be good, the performance of the tool with low end blacks (dark greys, darker shawy areas of the image) is absolutely terrible. Rather than just being a little noisy or something, they look splotchy and perhaps "diseased". It's like the sensor gets confused with the dark colors and randomly makes similar shades to bright, to dark, to bright, to dark, etc.
This tool has been good for photo editing - I've been pleased with the colors, I just ignore the splotchy parts. For photo viewing, though, it's hard to recommend it - the splotchy dark areas look really crappy.