[argyllcms] Re: ColorMunki or i1pro for CM

Philip Gross wrote:

I am interested in Technically details. Because I think the support
for the Colormunki will grow fast. I heart that Eizo Color-navigator
supports now the Colormunki. Also the X-rite Discontinued the i1 pro.
http://www.xrite.com/top_support.aspx?lang=en&action=discontinued
It's always surprising how X-Rite's marketing brings off to confuse their customers over and over by renaming established products and selling the same hardware bundled with different software designation with varying designations. 

We should try to tell the following devices apart from each other
(see also <http://argyllcms.com/doc/instruments.html> and <http://www.colormunki.com/>):
- the "i1Pro" (aka "Eye-One Pro") spectrophotometer. It phased through several hardware revisions (A ... D or E?). There are two basic hardware configurations: with and without UV cut filter. There once was a "crippled" version without reflective measurement capabilities named "Eye-One Monitor", but all others are full-value spectrometers for both emissive and reflective measurements. The i1Pro is/was part of reams of bundles (i1Photo, i1Photo LT, i1Photo LT UV, i1Design, i1Desing LT, i1Proof, i1XT, 1XTreme, i1XTreme UV Cut, i1Basic, ...). Many of these bundles are discontinued, but the i1Pro spectrometer itself is definitely not discontinued. Maybe we'll undergo many more product name changes and see bundles coming and going, but I don't think X-Rite will discontinue the i1Pro "hardware platform" in the foreseeable future: It's a best-seller (also in many OEM vesions), there are no real alternatives/replacement products for it in many applications and there is sophisticated accessory like the i1iO "robot" scanning table. X-Rite goes as far as to call it "the defacto industry standard i1Pro spectrophotometer" ;-) 

- the i1Display colorimeter and it's successor i1Display 2
- the "ColorMunki Create" -- AFAIK nothing but the i1Display 2 with a new name. I can imagine that the product name "i1Display" will disappear sooner or later and will be replaced by "ColorMunki [whatever]"
- the "ColorMunki Design" (white) or "ColorMunki Photo" (black). It's a new spectrophotometer with LED illumination (without noteworthy UV content in the spectrum and therefore de-facto a UV-cut instrument). X-Rite tries to mark-off the markets for the i1Pro and the ColorMunki Design against each other: There is no "universal" SDK for the ColorMunki Design in contrast to the i1Pro. X-Rite apparently tries to limit ColorMunki-based printer calibration/profiling applications exclusively to their own ColorMunki profiling software.
It's hard to compare the technical details of the ColorMunki Design/Photo and the i1Pro: while the i1Pro vendor specs are sketchy, the ColorMunki specs are more or less nonexistent. As Graeme reported, the spectral ragne of the Munki is limited to 430-730nm in reflective, and 400-730nm in emissive mode (i1Pro: 380-730nm). The number of patches manageable with the munki is substantially lower that with the i1Pro.
The ColorMunki Design apparently does not reach the quality standard of the i1Pro (at it does not aim to reach it), but it is an interesting, versatile and affordable spectrophotometer anyway and I'm really happy that Graeme managed to write an open source driver for it :-) 

Klaus

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