Customers Reviews
2010-03-13
does what is says it'll do - almost
I've owned the color munki for about a month now and I've done 3 or 4 monitor calibrations and two printer calibrations. Here is what I can say about it: the color munki comes with its own software and mine needed to be patched before I could use it. Of course, you have to install the software and then run the program before you know it needs a patch but before it tells you about the patch, the first thing it wants to do is have you register at their website, so I did. Then it told me about an update being available, so I downloaded it. The update does not auto install so you need to go through all that again. At which time it will again ask you to register the software. Now, that threw me a bit and I wondered if perhaps the first registration didn't take. So I registered again. No harm, no foul - just a bit of a bump during installation.
After all that, everything went smoothly and the color munki is performing as advertised. My monitor is calibrated and my printer is calibrated and almost everything prints as it is displayed on the screen. I say almost everything because my blacks are just different enough that I can notice. I haven't had the time to do an advanced calibration but I am hoping that when I do it solves that problem. The munki is on the expensive side of the scale, but I wanted a good calibrator and I'm sure once I deal with the blacks problem I'll be totally satisfied.
The munki is well built and the case it comes with is nice also. The zipper allows you to fully enclose the case but still access the port to plug the wire into it. Rotating the knob is a bit weird for me - just awkward I guess. But not a big issue.
I love the fact that you can calibrate several paper types and have the profiles saved for future use.
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2010-03-07
Pluses and Minuses
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.
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2010-01-14
Colormunki is not worth the $
I bought the Colormunki to calibrate my Samsung monitor to my Epson Photo R1900 printer. From what I read and from the Colormunki training DVD, this was supposed to be a simple, fool proof process for getting printed output to match what you see on the screen. My experience says don't waste your money. It has not worked. You can get just as good results by using the custom profiles created by Epson for this printer. And X-rite's technical support is almost none existent! They take days and sometimes weeks to respond and they're not very helpful when they do.
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2010-01-01
Great results in that price range
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.
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2009-12-30
iMac Users Beware
I'm very familiar with with challenges and criticisms surrounding the glossy iMac as a serious photography platform. Unfortunately, my iMac purchase predated my revived photography interest. Be that as it may, after spending a year transitioning into a semi-serious/advanced amateur digital photogrpahy mode, I realized I needed to get my system calibrated somehow. After doing significant web research, I settled on the Colormunki. Believe me, I really, really wanted to like it.
Granted, some of the problems are, I believe, due to the iMac platform and hardware, not a failing of this product. But here are my issues, for whatever they're worth.
FIY, I am using Shades to do the luminance adjustment. The initial levels measure out at about 300cd at the iMac factory settings. Colormunki has me turning that down to 80cd based on ambient light conditions, which according to Shades is a level of 54%.
1. I typically do my daily work under an account other than the Mac OS default admin account. Running the Colormunki calibration routine under a non-admin account fails. The profile gets created but cannot be applied to the current user settings. The error message is non-descriptive. Just says the profile can not be applied. No help in figuring out why. So then you have to switch over to the Admin account, and run the calibration routine. Maybe I still don't understand my iMac, but after running the calibration routine as Admin, I was unable to go back to my working account and make that the working profile. The non-Admin account seems to be locked on to whatever profile the Admin account is using. So, switch back to the Admin account, make that the Admin profile, then switch back to the daily use account. But if you do the account switch via Fast User switching, every switch seems to cause the profile to get reapplied multiple times to the existing monitor setup. So the luminance gets progressivly darker and colors go out of whack until it is totally unusable and a restart is needed. Only successful switching process that works is to logout of the daily use account completely, log into the Admin account, create and apply the profile, then logout and back in to the daily use account. However, I then found that the profile settings created under the Admin account weren't correct when run under the daily account. Final steps that worked were to create the profile under the daily user account, let Colormunki save it in my user Library Colorsync folder, copy the created .icc file to the system Library Colorsync folder, logout of the daily account and into the Admin account, make the new .icc files the current profile, then log out and back in again. This whole process took over 6 hours to figure out.
2. The physical configuration with the pouch and strap is terrible. You feel like your wrestling an octopus most of the time. If you are setting luminance based on ambient conditions, you have to take the sensor out of the pouch and sit it on the desk next to your monitor. I know it seems like a silly thing but getting the sensor back in the pouch, with the cable and hanging strap flapping around, and some bit of confusion about the proper orientation of the sensor in the pouch (can only fit one way) makes for a very aggravating experience.
When the sensor is in the pouch and ready to be suspended from the monitor, the USB cable attachement at the sensor and the strap attachment for the pouch are virtually right on top of one another. This results in the USB cable and hanging strap getting twisted around each other in such a way that the sensor won't lay flat against the monitor. You can untangle them but the cable and strap still tend to exert pulling forces on each other and can tend to keep the sensor from maintaining full and flat contact against the monitor glass.
Maybe I didn't read deep enough into the very sparse "Quick Start Guide", but the pouch has a little sliding plastic tab that covers the sensor eye, I presume for protection when the sensor is not in use. If you don't see that and slide it open before you begin your calibration process, you obviously will fail. Oddly, the Colormunki software will happily chug along doing its thing to try and calibrate the monitor until the last step when it tells you it fails but not why.
When the sensor is in the pouch, you can't see the markings on the side of it to turn the function dial. The sensor looks virtually identical from either side in terms of dimensions and shape, with a function dial on both sides, and so you you may be looking at the onscreen prompt to turn the dial with the accompanying picture, but you may well have the sensor backward and upside down in your hand. But because you can't see the markings on the dial, it is not readily apparent which way you have to turn it.
The ergonomics of this thing are probably about the worst of any device I've ever seen.
3. I can't trust the color corrections, whatever they are. The iMac display doesn't display any color shift at all between the factory and Colormunki profiles. I've even had my wife look at it and she has superb color accuity, where mine is a bit iffy. When I look at the profile properties under Colorsync, I see that they are clearly different, but I see no difference whatsoever on the screen. I don't know if that means the iMac factory profile is spot on for color, or if the profile changes just aren't being applied to the display. On the otherhand, I have a second monitor attached, a Samsung Synchmaster, and when I profile it, it takes on this gastly magenta hue. Even with my slightly substandard color vision, I can see that this isn't right. Multiple passes with the Colormunki on the second monitor yield the same results. So I returned the second monitor to the factory default. Thus, as far as I can tell, the only thing my $344 bought me was a recommendation to turn the brightness on the monitor down by about half.
Sadly, I've arrived at the conclusion that the Colormunki is not what I need. Whether it's the iMac platform or shortcomings in this product, either way, $344 is too much to pay for this level of frustration and lack of confidence.
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