There certainly is a market for custom printer profiles. How large is debatable, but it is substantial. The tradeoff for a customer of these services comes down to how much investment is required in purchasing the necessary hardware and software vs. paying a profiling service to build the profiles. For the DIY crowd, at the low end there is the
ColorMunki for $400 (with current rebates) that builds reasonably good profiles or the somewhat less capable
DataColor Spyder 3 Print for under $250. Either may prove "good enough" if your needs are not overly critical.
Stepping up, we get to the standard
X-Rite Eye-One Proof at $1000. This is what many self-described profiling services use. To upgrade to a full-bore profiling solution - i1Profiler - requires another $800 from the basic i1 solution or
$500 if you already own more advanced software.
Profiling services run the gamut from guys owning an i1 and simply turning the crank to outfits that have been around for some time and have both a range of equipment and software available and detailed knowledge of how to best make use of it. The first group charges about $10 per profile. The instrument used may be more accurate than a ColorMunki or Spyder 3, but who knows as to whether it is calibrated, etc. There are a few companies that have real experience. My outfit,
Dry Creek Photo, has been providing printer profiles for almost a decade,
CHROMiX for a year or two longer, and Andrew Rodney's
Digital Dog for longer still. You pay more for these folks services, but you benefit their experience making thousands of profiles (I can't speak for the others, but we are closing in on 100000 profiles), and knowledge of how to wring the utmost performance out of your printer. For really high-end work, you can always hire a consultant to work on-sight. Chromix, Andrew,
Rods and Cones, and frequent forum poster
Scott Martin are all good ones.
So where does that leave X-Rite? They are charging $1000 for a new installation of i1Profiler. The product is not full-featured, and I have many complaints (amply noted in previous posts). At that price point, however, they probably do not want to enable anyone to set up shop as a bespoke profile provider. From my perspective, X-Rite has been sitting on their thumbs for many years. The main innovation of i1Profiler appears to be combining Monaco Profiler's color engine with ProfileMaker's ability to use arbitrary targets and spectral data. Evolutionary but not revolutionary.
Alternatives do exist. Edmund mentioned
Argyll. It is a free, open-source product. Profiles made by Argyll are not subject to any restrictions on usage or sale. The profile quality can. particularly for CMYK, be spectacular. There is one serious caveat: using Argyll is not a straightforward process. There are numerous variables, all of which affect profile quality to a large extent. Building a profile is easy, but building a good one with Argyll requires a great deal of experience and repeated tests and trials.
BasICColor has also been busy innovating. Their product lineup has many offerings, some of which look pushed to market before they were ready. I have no direct experience with BasICColor's Print software, except as a user of profiles it created. They were certainly respectable, and the
product data sheet notes most of the features one wants. I, however, would need to put the software through its paces before giving it an endorsement. I had never heard of qualux until this afternoon, so no opinions there.