I spoke to a very knowledgeable salesperson, Michelle, at Xrite yesterday. I was asking about most effective upgrade path from PM5. I have a purple dongle for PM5. She said I'd need to buy the i1Pro 2 basic package at $1199 retail USA, then add upgrade package A. Here's the cool/interesting part depending on your frame of mind. The upgrade A package is going to add newest i1PublishPro activation onto my old PM5 purple dongle while still leaving PM5 active. So, I will be able to use PM5 with my old Spectrolino/spectroscan including full functionality to Measuretool, and the same dongle will also serve as the "dongle" to the i1Pro basic device and enable full use of i1PublishPro. That's my best upgrade path since I only need one seat for i1publishPro. She said if I needed to activate the i1Pro2 spectro on its own independent of the old dongle, then I'd need to buy the more expensive i1Pro2 "photo" or "publish" bundles, but as long as I'm Ok using the old purple PM5 dongle as my i1PublishPro enabler, then I only need the i1Pro2 basic. So, total upgrade cost for me is $1199 for unit, and $599 for upgrade A. Pricey, but I personally do think the new device plus latest profiling software is reasonably priced for such a specialized product.
I'm pretty happy with that news, but that said, it took a fair amount of time to wade through all the options with Michelle, so I forgot to ask whether the latest Eula is going to strip any of my original PM5 rights with respect to distributing PM5 built profiles to others. I personally think it would be illegal to tell me PM5 is still going to function at 100% while failing to say I give up some rights I originally had with the PM5 package. FWIW, I don't really distribute "generic profiles" for others to use, just custom profiles for clients outputting to my own printers which is fair use even with Xrite's most restrictive Eulas AFAIK, so it's somewhat of a moot issue for me. However, for others, it would perhaps be wise to double check the EULA with respect to the latest one stripping out rights from PM5. Or was that big snafu with the original i1Publish upgrade from PM5 Eula resolved some time ago?
What I really like about the new i1Pro2 is that Xrite seems to have reincorporated the full feature set of the original Spectrolino that got lost on the first i1pro model (UV included/excluded capability plus a more rational foot design for hand held spot measurements). It also looks like the ruler scanning mode is going to work much better with accurate positioning coordinates being supplied from the ruler itself and not just relying solely on weird printed lines/gaps and scrambled patches in the target itself.
best,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com