When I first heard about the xRite ColorMunki, I pretty much dismissed it as little use to those interested in serious color management.  I’ve seen it mentioned many times on forums, and it seems to get pretty good reviews.  I was skeptical ... how can any device create a decent profile with only 100 or so colors being sampled?  It couldn’t imagine how it would create a decent profile.

Recently I’ve been hanging out at Pixel’s Foto and Frame quite a bit ... being retired is great as long as you have some fun things to do, and messing around with gear is always fun.  The other day I spotted a ColorMunki on the shelf and felt maybe it was time to review it.  It’s nothing new, and there are plenty of reviews out there, so really I just wanted an excuse to check it out for myself.

The ColorMunki consists of a software package and a hardware device.  The entire concept of the device is to take the complexity out calibrating and profiling your display, and profiling your output devices. The software is simple and almost foolproof ... do this then click next.

Profiling a display is pretty straight forward.  It gives you a choice of a target luminance (brightness) or will read the ambient light and then provide a target.  Personally I believe the logic behind the ambient light step is misguided and I see little point in using it.  It recommended a setting of only 80 cd/m2, which was way too dim, resulting in light prints.  The prints looked fine next to my display ... which is pretty dimly lit.  It’s almost like the ambient light reading is trying to determine how bright your print viewing conditions are, not your ambient light settings ... they should not be the same.  I still recommend screen brightness be adjusted by opening a blank white document in photoshop and try to adjust the white to match a blank piece of paper in your viewing station.  If the two aren’t close enough to be viewed together, then100-120 cd/m2 is a much better starting target.

Another slight issue I have with monitor profiles is you can’t set a custom white point with the ColorMunki.  I find most of the time a default 6500k white point is too cool, and most of my profiles are built around a white point of 6100k.  That being said I was surprised when profiling my Apple 24” LED display with the ColorMunki the end result was nearly identical to the profile built with the i1 Pro and i1 Match software.  The profile built by the ColorMunki was perfectly acceptable, and certainly far better than not have a calibrated and profiled display.

Now it was time to build a printer profile.  I used the software and device to build a new profile for my Epson 7900 printer and Epson Ultra Premium Luster paper.  My first try resulted in a terrible profile ... obviously problematic.  I concluded this was due to the current Leopard/Snow Leopard issue when printing targets.  The second time, I changed the setting in the ColorMatch tab to use Epson Color Controls rather than ColorSync, but left color management disabled in the printer settings dialog, which resulted in an accurate target. Here are some screen shots to show the settings... (windows 7 may also have some issues, be sure you have the latest software from xRite, but the targets from windows should be correct).

The profile creation process surprised me, and after creating a profile I understand a little more about the logic and ability to use such a small number of patches to create a profile.  The process to me is quite ingenious ... you print out a specific target of colors, which you read in.  The software then analyzes the results, and produces a second target based on the data from the first target to further refine the profile.  The end result was a profile that was slightly smaller in gamut size than Epson’s profile for the same paper, but not by much. It appears to have some limits in refining the highest saturation points (edges), but the overall profile seems to be quite accurate.

Comparing Epson’s profile (wireframe) with ColorMunki profile

A simple comparison like this in ColorThink doesn’t really indicate how good the profile is.  Additionally in ColorThink I can compare a curve graph of the new profile with Epson’s profile, and visually you can see they are very close.

In the bottom right corner is a small bullseye target.  As you drag through the graph a blue linemoves and a corresponding red dot in the bullseye will show a Chroma value for that area of the profile.  The closer this tracks to center (0) the better.  While the colormunki profile isn’t as good as the Epson one, it still is very good. Here is a little movie, you can drag the scrubber and watch the value and the dot move to compare the two (the ColorMunki profile is the one on the left, Epson’s is on the right).  I’ve always felt anything that stays within the smallest circle or exceeds it slightly is a pretty good indicator of a decent profile.

Once I’m pretty confident there are no extreme anomalies in a profile, the next test is a standard print. I printed out Bill Atkinson’s test page using both the factory profile and my new ColorMunki profile and the results were extremely close.  I did find an additional problem in that by default the ColorMunki generates a version 4 ICC profile which has the odd issue in Snow Leopard of printing a gray color wherever there is no image data.  (so the borders past the image are grey).  This is easily resolved by a setting in the preferences to generate a version 2 profile instead.

An additional feature is the ability to refine a profile.  This is especially helpful if you have images that tend to have a lot of similar tones, such as flesh tones.  Here you actually load an image file into the software and it will produce a target based on the colors of the image.  You read this target in, and a new profile is created.  I did this step using Bill Atkinson’s test page, and the resulting profile in ColorThink does show some increased gamut in a few key colors.

The device itself is easy to use for most things.  I found the revolving switch a little awkward to use and it seemed far too easy to accidentally click the button (although normally that didn’t cause any problem or errors).

For those wanting better color management tools this seems to be a very capable device for a very reasonable price.  If you have no need of making printer profiles then perhaps a display only device would be less expensive, but for a little more you have the ability to make a profile if you want ... not a bad thing.