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Author Topic: Basiccolor cease trading  (Read 8545 times)

Rhossydd

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Basiccolor cease trading
« on: May 30, 2019, 01:30:03 am »

Just received an email;
"after more than 10 years of color management business, basICColor GmbH will be closed down on 31st May 2019. "
"I will try to establish channels with partners who are able to offer product support."
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #1 on: May 30, 2019, 07:52:51 am »

I look upon this as a very unfortunate development. BasICColor was offering a superb product suite in a field where there is already precious little competition and choice at the high-quality end of the market for these products and services. A healthy market and a good climate for progress requires a certain level of effective competition and BasICColor was one of the key participants in making this happen. I hope their good work will be carried on under different organizational and marketing arrangements rather than abandoned altogether.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Klahne

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #2 on: May 30, 2019, 10:16:45 am »

This is disappointing news.  I photograph artwork with a Sinar CTM, which incorporates software components from BasICColor and Sinar, (and a Sinar digital back, algorithms and filter recipes from Dr. Roy Burns at RIT and other specialized hardware).  Hopefully, I'm wrong but this doesn't appear to bode well for unique and/or customized digital imaging systems.

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Alexey.Danilchenko

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #3 on: May 30, 2019, 05:24:18 pm »

What's really disappointing is that on MacOS X it will die out altogether with the next release of MacOS - the BasICColor Display is still 32 bit application....
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kers

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #4 on: May 30, 2019, 05:37:51 pm »

What's really disappointing is that on MacOS X it will die out altogether with the next release of MacOS - the BasICColor Display is still 32 bit application....
It looks like this 32 to 64 bit transition is the bottleneck for some very nice software.
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Pieter Kers
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Doug Gray

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #5 on: May 30, 2019, 09:42:50 pm »

Seems to me like precision printing is becoming more of a niche. There are fewer posts every year related to precision printing. At least it seems so to me. Sad.
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Rhossydd

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #6 on: May 31, 2019, 01:50:45 am »

I hope their good work will be carried on under different organizational and marketing arrangements rather than abandoned altogether.
That doesn't sound likely from the email.

Certainly a shame there's less products in the CM field as they go, but whilst their products performed well, they were expensive and the licencing procedure was awkward.
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GWGill

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #7 on: June 01, 2019, 07:24:52 pm »

Certainly a shame there's less products in the CM field as they go, but whilst their products performed well, they were expensive and the licencing procedure was awkward.
Not expensive enough it seems, to actually sustain a business.

CM is a highly technical niche product, so it is always going to be on the expensive side. But if it isn't valued, then it will go away, or become even more expensive and hard to access. The other aspect of course was the vertical integration of instrument makers and software makers that happened some time ago in the case of X-Rite. That immediately made a software only business much harder to sustain. People seem to be prepared to pay money for the hardware, but not for the software.

« Last Edit: June 02, 2019, 03:11:17 am by GWGill »
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #8 on: June 01, 2019, 07:46:39 pm »

CM is a number of different products and some of them are not particularly expensive. It depends on how high up the quality/sophistication chain one wants to buy and who the sellers are. Some of their software needed bespoke hardware, others not. They had quite a few applications on the market by the time they closed shop. The one I can see being problematic would be the "Print" application which needs a spectrophotometer. With X-Rite monopolizing the i1Profiler-grade of product and bundling it with profiling software, users must buy the bundle. At that point it wasn't obvious why one should have bought basICColor Print as well. But their other products didn't suffer from this issue.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Rhossydd

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #9 on: June 02, 2019, 03:29:05 am »

Not expensive enough it seems, to actually sustain a business.
The profitability may not be the reason the business has folded, in one man businesses there can be many other reasons to cease trading.
Quote
it wasn't obvious why one should have bought basICColor Print as well.
This is where price does come into play. If the cost is low enough, people will buy it even if they do have other similar products. It could deliver better results, better GUI or have an easier workflow.
I would have brought the print package to compare to other offerings I have here at the right price, but high cost and a poor experience with licencing the monitor package meant I didn't get my credit card out.
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Czornyj

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #10 on: June 02, 2019, 06:27:09 am »

Not expensive enough it seems, to actually sustain a business.

CM is a highly technical niche product, so it is always going to be on the expensive side. But if it isn't valued, then it will go away, or become even more expensive and hard to access. The other aspect of course was the vertical integration of instrument makers and software makers that happened some time ago in the case of X-Rite. That immediately made a software only business much harder to sustain. People seem to be prepared to pay money for the hardware, but not for the software.

They were mostly rebadgging colorlogic.de products, which are still available (and expensive enough)
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Marcin Kałuża | [URL=http://zarzadzaniebarwa

Mark D Segal

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #11 on: June 02, 2019, 08:24:19 am »

They were mostly rebadgging colorlogic.de products, which are still available (and expensive enough)

For the several basICColor products that I beta-tested at various times, I have reasons to believe that is not the case. And of course, depending on how "rebadgging" is done, there could be copyright implications. But in any case, I fail to see what this has to do with the present situation, details of which we do not have and most likely won't.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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DP

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #12 on: June 02, 2019, 12:01:58 pm »

They were mostly rebadgging colorlogic.de products, which are still available (and expensive enough)

as if they were using ColorLogic's source code ? or using their own code to provide a similar functionality ?
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Czornyj

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #13 on: June 02, 2019, 04:12:35 pm »

as if they were using ColorLogic's source code ? or using their own code to provide a similar functionality ?

They either used Colorlogic code, or they developed it together with Colorlogic - anyway CoPrA and Ant has many tools and functionalities that look exactly like basICColor print, catch and DeviL etc. ones. Not sure about gHOST and ZePrA, but most probably the same.
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Marcin Kałuża | [URL=http://zarzadzaniebarwa

DP

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #14 on: June 03, 2019, 05:40:43 am »

They either used Colorlogic code, or they developed it together with Colorlogic - anyway CoPrA and Ant has many tools and functionalities that look exactly like basICColor print, catch and DeviL etc. ones. Not sure about gHOST and ZePrA, but most probably the same.
can be vice versa - ColorLogic used their code under some agreement, no ?
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Czornyj

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #15 on: June 03, 2019, 07:11:34 am »

can be vice versa - ColorLogic used their code under some agreement, no ?

"From the very beginning our main focus has been on an OEM business model: To license our technologies to other companies or to develop products for our partners who then market the products under their own name and brands. Today this concept allows us to focus on what we do best – developing first class technologies.'

"An interesting aspect is that we always use our own Software Development Kit (SDK) as a basis for our products."

https://colorlogic.de/en/colorlogic-history/
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Marcin Kałuża | [URL=http://zarzadzaniebarwa

Christopher

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #16 on: July 01, 2019, 03:37:36 pm »

not very suprising, they stopped answering emails and never delivered the most recent software...
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Christopher Hauser
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GWGill

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #17 on: September 18, 2019, 08:52:31 am »

I came across this, suggesting that BasICColor are continuing in a different form, but their website continues to be unresponsive, so it's unclear what the status actually is.
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belnea

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #18 on: September 18, 2019, 01:20:43 pm »

at 1000 euro, discus, it would be a shame that the app did not switch to 64 bits for the next mac os X…
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GWGill

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Re: Basiccolor cease trading
« Reply #19 on: September 18, 2019, 07:01:59 pm »

at 1000 euro, discus, it would be a shame that the app did not switch to 64 bits for the next mac os X…
If BasICColor had sent me an instrument, I would have added support to ArgyllCMS (and hence DisplayCAL & HCFR), and so provided a fallback option.

But maybe this side of their business is still viable, and there will be a 64 bit update ???
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