[argyllcms] ColorMunki :- Good news and Bad news
- From: Graeme Gill <graeme@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: argyllcms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:06:21 +1100
First the Good News:
Thanks to all those who have contributed donations, there has been
(just) enough to purchase a ColorMunki Design, so I now have something
to have a play with over Christmas :-)
Then the bad news:
It seems that although the general arrangement of communications
to the instrument bears some similarity to the Eye-One Pro, it
appears to differ in almost every detail. [It kind of amazes
me that X-Rite has the resources for what amounts to a technically
unnecessary re-write of both the instrument firmware and corresponding
driver code. Perhaps the source code wasn't particularly maintainable,
and they felt they had to re-write it anyway ? Perhaps they have
lots of developers with nothing to do :-) ??]
The consequence of this is that writing a driver will be no straightforward
task - it's basically similar to starting from scratch again with the
Eye-One Pro :-(
And the Ugly:
For those contemplating buying the instrument, I note the
following:
There are no drivers on the CD that comes with it.
Instead you get to download 130Mbytes of software over the internet
per platform (Took me just under two hours).
Even though the manual that comes with the instrument claims that
it will work on Windows 2000, it doesn't install properly, and
once installed the main application fails to run, exiting with a crash.
Presumably it works better on Windows XP.
The software has some sort of copy protection scheme that limits
installation to three computers. Where the installations are registered
(ie., in the instrument ?), and how they get de-registered is a bit
of a mystery at the moment. Given that the software isn't particularly
useful without an instrument, it's also a puzzle why X-Rite
have gone for this scheme.
An interesting question I have after looking at the instrument,
is whether the spectrometer module is the same one that is used
in the i1iSis. Intriguingly the module has a white illumination
LED on one side, and a similar looking empty slot directly opposite.
I could well imagine that this slot would be filled with a UV LED,
something that the i1iSis has...
Graeme Gill.
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