That is BS, as Keith covers in his article(s)....
Wow, what crawled up your....
BTW...do not muddy a discussion of printer profiling with display profiling. While colormunki does both, the SpyderPrint is dedicated to print. A separate, dedicated Spyder offering is for displays.
At what additional cost? How's that muddying the water?
On B&H the SpyderPRINT system costs $319. It doesn't have provisions to profile a display or projector. On the same site, the ColorMunki is $449. So right off the bat, you're saving money on the ColorMunki. That is mudding?
The ColorMunki is a true Spectrophotometer. A 10nm LED device that produces spectral data. The SpyderPRINT is said to be a Spectrocolometer (whatever that is, a colorimeter? A Spectrophotometer? A dessert topping and floor wax)? Does it really produce spectral data?
The SpyderPRINT package comes with profile tuning sliders, ask yourself why (lots of users apparently need to use them to get a desired profile, not necessary with ColorMunki). And does the edit affect both parts of the profile table? What's the cost in terms of time, ink and paper to tune a profile?
The SpyderPRINT seems to expect a 729 patch target, one patch at a time, the ColorMunki only requires 100 patches and it can measure in a scanning mode. Faster and as importantly, you're getting something like 100 samples per second, averaging the measured data. One patch at a time? I did that back in early 90's with a ColorTron and let me tell you, it's no fun. Yes, the ColorMunki requires two sets of targets (50+50) to be measured and perhaps someone who's really good at measuring a single patch could read 729 faster than someone could scan 100 IF you include the time you don't have to sit there waiting for the 2nd print to dry before you measure it. But if time is money, you can do something else while the 2nd target dries. Either way, you'll be spending far, far less time measuring with the Munki and getting more data averaging.
But how is the quality of the Munki? My friend George Jardine the Lightroom guy has a Munki and built profiles on two papers, asked me to build profiles using i1Profiler, an iSis XL, 1729 patches plus 2505 optimization patches and we compared the output from both. Mine was a little better but not by much. Of course you can't take MY word for it, ask George as he's got a set of prints too (
http://mulita.com/blog/)
Look, if someone wants me to compare the 729 one patch a a time profile (ugh) to the iSis using the same process as I did for George, loan me a unit for a few days. I'll even have George print the same images.
This article is almost 4 years old.
What's the saying about those who neglect history? OK, more recent offerings, not that this has as high a bearing on the two products as the items presented above.
http://stonerosephotos.com/blog/2010/08/fun-with-spyder3print-sr/However, the system is not without its pitfalls. I learned several of these the hard way. In fact, my initial efforts were absolutely abysmal; and I finally wound up raising a ticket with Datacolor, the suppliers of the S3P product.
http://www.sicip.net/articles/spyder3print-page1.htmThis is a tedious process which takes about 3 seconds per patch. A big target of 729 patches would therefore take around 40 minutes to complete. It is mind-numbing work but you have also to keep your wits about you. Initially we worked far too fast, missed patches and mis-read others. The resulting profiles were shown to be poor by examining a Granger Chart, using the soft proof facility of Photoshop (see screen grab). Suitably chastened, we slowed right down and worked very slowly and methodically. The yellow patches were the most difficult to align as there was little differentiation between them and their white, dividing strokes. The other problem to watch for is that you must make sure you do not scrape the feet of the colorimeter over the unmeasured portion of the target. The drag of the USB lead is a perpetual source of irritation when moving the instrument around. The measuring guide is one of the better ones we have tried but its roller feet were so sticky that they started by ripping the front of the print clean off!
Further (to be fair):
We tested the Spyder against our (very expensive) spectrophotometers and found it to be accurate enough for everyday professional photography use. The claim on the box of the Spyder being a tool for 'production professionals' is a little far-fetched.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1BYG69711BCT7/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R1BYG69711BCT7Prior to purchasing this I had been using X-Rite's Pulse Color Elite System which was VERY EASY to use and made accurate printer profiles. Unfortunately, our unit has died out after 6 years, and so we opted to try this device from Colorvision. I cannot give good reviews for this device simply because
reading the patches of the profile is tremendously difficult. One has to learn a very precise timing when reading the patches otherwise one gets it wrong. Even after getting a hang of the timing, and the patches seem to have been read correctly, one notices that some of the patches read are gray. In other words it registered some white spaces in between color patches and read it as a color. With the X-Rite model,reading patches was no problem at all and one could get the hang of the timing after a couple of tries. Also, the X-rite system was smart enough to know what was a color patch and what was the space in between the color patches. The spyder can't make a distinction. Ok, I know some people might say you need to take more time to get the hang of it. But the fact of the matter is, its supposed to be easy and you're supposed to be able to read patches in minutes. It has now been some hours of repeated trial and error and I have not been able to get one single row of patches that i am confident is accurate. With X-Rite I finished all the patches and created a profile in less than 10 minutes without a sweat. So far this device is wasting so much time. The only other option is to read it measure it patch by patch which will be so tedious.
I should have stuck with X-Rite.Issues with blue shifting:
http://connect.dpreview.com/forums/post/34535290I get the magenta shift in the blue skies but I do not see this shift in photoshops softproof (AR: seems the proofing table in the profile need some work!). I do see it in the print preview of the epson driver though, but I can never trust the driver preview because its never accurate. (AR, he's right, don't look there).
Of course this isn't their profile engine (or so they say) it's something about OOG colors (funny):
Sky blues are just easiest to notice because (a) they tend to take up physically large areas of images, and (b) we find it easier to visually accept a shift that's cyan.
David Miller (of datacolor)
No such issues with the i1P engine which ColorMunki uses… In fact, ask a few other color geeks who hang out here how they find the new i1P color engine.