Review Pantone eye one

digitalfailure

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Brian
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In an attempt to get some interest back in using my camera, i've decided that i'm going to spend more time printing my shots instead of shooting away and never looking at them again.

I've always had a problem with my Epson stylus 950 printing much darker than the onscreen image. :(
To get a print somewhere near usually involved about 4 sheets of premium glossy and a lot of trial and error and a screen that required you to wear sunglasses to view it.

So, with me meeting up with some great people from this site at the focus on imaging show I went in search of the first step in the colour management chain.



After a couple of laps of the exhibition.......sorry Carole and glo :( I put my grubby little mit in my pocket and bought an Eye-One monitor calibration device.




The eye-one comes in 2 styles really, the LT and the display 2. Both use the same hardware but the LT is bundled with stripped out software. The software is available as a £££ download from the Pantone website........BUT, after asking a few choice questions the guy on the stand let slip that there was a software update available for download that gave increased functionality.(y)
With that in mind, I bought the LT and returned home a happy bunny.

In the small box you get a software CD, an instruction sheet, a little white cover (i'll come to that later), a weight and the sensor device thingy itself.

I installed the software and rebooted as per the instructions and then plugged the Eye-One into a usb port. Xp found the device straight away and installed the drivers it needed.

Running the software for the first time was a straight forward job....even by my standards :LOL:

Tell the program what screen you have.....LCD,CRT or laptop and then follow the rest of the onscreen prompts. After approx 3 minutes I was being asked to name the profile and hit the save button.

I wasn't impressed with the degree of control the ver 3.5 software offered, but i needed to use it before the update to see what the new bits were. So..........I installed the 3.6.1 and repeated the process again

The new software gave far more options during the calibration stage including an ambient light measurement which involved clipping the little white doohickey I mentioned earlier onto the front of the sensor thing.

The profile it created on my laptop screen wasn't much different to how it looked to start with, but in fairness it wasn't that bad to begin with and as laptops go, you don't get a lot of control over contrast etc.

running the process on my Sammy syncmaster offered far more options again and now the image is pretty much spot on with a big difference in colour cast on the before and after comparison.




I'll eventually get round to posting a few images of the device in action.....but for now this is just an inforeview :LOL:

I dowloaded the printer profile chart files from www.pureprofiles.com and they looked very good on screen,with good colour saturation and a visible change in all the blocks of the grey scale bars.

Printing them out reminded me just how well the old 950 prints, even if the the prints were a little darker than the screen image still, but already a closer match than anything i've had so far.




I'll be posting the charts off the pureprofiles for them to build me a profile for my set up and that'll be the next subject I use to bore anyone who's managed to stay awake this far down the page.

:LOL::D:LOL:
 
Sweet. Good little toy you've got yourself.
... any plans on renting it out?
 
Its a nice piece of kit, i use the Gretag Macbeth eye-one display 2, just the same but sold before Pantone bought them out.
 
So....when you going to come and calibrate my screen/printer for me??:LOL:

OOh yes. that would be much better than renting it........getting DF to come round and give us a personal service!!! :D :LOL: :naughty: :clap:
 
Glad you managed to cough up and buy something eventually - it certainly took some deliberating over :LOL:

Add me to the queue for personal service too please :D
 
So many ladies :naughty:.....and marcel........so little time :D

Carole.....as we both have the same printer and the same problem with regards to dark images, i'll let you know how I get on with the printer profile from pureprofiles.com

I have the test charts printed and while the screen image now looks really good, the prints are a tad dark still in comparison...they've been out to dry since monday night now, so are ready for posting back for them to build a profile

if you use epson inks and epson premium photo glossy paper, you might be in luck too :D
 
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