Spyder3 Studio RS vs i1 Photo Pro

[schrodingerscat]

Greetings -

I've been using an i1 Photo Pro kit for monitor calibration and printer profile making for awhile now, and have been happy with the results. However, Xrite wants $400 for a software upgrade to make it compatible with OS 10.7(Lion).

The Spyder3 Studio RS outfit has been getting good reviews and is Lion compatible out of the box for about the price of the Xrite upgrade. Selling the i1 would leave me with a tidy sum, and divest me from the lackadaisical support and software development of Xrite. The Spyder also has some capabilities that the i1 lacks.

I've used the Datacolor products in the past, and they've always been good with support, and their upgrades have been either free or vary modestly priced.

I'm not a working pro and mostly print as a hobbyist, so the rapidly escalating investment in the i1 is looking less attractive all the time. And while I plan on sticking with OS 10.6.8 for the foreseeable future, eventually I will be assimilated...

Any insights appreciated.

[bill t.]

I have an old "Spyder 3 Print" probe labeled on the back as a "Datacolor Spectrocolorimeter."  Maybe 2 or 3 years old, so please take that into account for fairness.

While it gave me considerably more useable profiles than the manufacturers' canvas profiles I was using at the time, it was at best able to create profiles with perhaps 2/3 the overall colorspace as the i1 Pro Photo that I am now using, and it tended to give me quite warm renditions that I often had to fight in Photoshop.  But OTOH those profiles are still the preferred ones on a few specific images, which points to the danger of building up too big an inventory of images based on poor profiles.

So unless the intervening years have given the current Spyder Print offering a better color sensor, I'd pass.  The i1 Pro Photo is quite nice and I have never seen screen and prints in such good agreement, possibly due in some part to calibrating both with the same puck.  I have several images with big blue skies and/or expansive dark areas that invoked "Out of Gamut" warnings over most of the image with the Spyder profiles, but which are completely within gamut for the i1 Pro Photo profiles.