Retail Price £200 - Supplier Gretag Macbeth

 

Hands up the owners of digital cameras, inkjet printers and expensive editing software. Come on don't be shy. We've all rushed out to buy the latest technology to ensure the holiday snaps look hot. Now how many of you have ever stopped to consider the colour accuracy or your monitor?

 

Sure, you'd splash out a few hundred bucks on an inkjet printer or even five hundred pounds for some Adobe loving. But what's the use of all that expensive technology if your monitor can't display colour accurately. You might aswell close your eyes, press the print button and say three Hail Mary's. Okay maybe you have tried using software solutions to manually adjust a display's image to perfection. A royal pain in the butt - one image looks great and you load another one up and it looks terrible. Help is at hand with a clever piece of hardware from Gretag Macbeth called the Eye One Display.

 

The device is targetted towards digital photographers, graphic artists and home enthusiasts wishing to get the most from their monitor. But before we look at the Eye One, let's find out about the importance of colour management to users in the digital world.

 

So why colour manage?

The best explanation as to the nature of colour management is the toaster analogy by Steve Upton:

 

"Let's say you get up in the morning, walk out to your kitchen and place a piece of bread in your toaster setting it to a level of "4". After a little while a certain color of toast pops out - hopefully a pleasing color. Now if you take the next piece of bread in the loaf over to your neighbors and put it in his toaster at the same setting of "4" do you think you will get the same color of toast? Probably not. This is the problem of color management. The settings used on the toaster do not necessarily produce the same colors. As in the toaster, RGB and CMYK values on your computer are also just settings. And, just like the toasters, when they are sent to different devices, they produce different colors!"

 

This is the problem of color management. The settings used on the toaster do not necessarily produce the same colors. As in the toaster, RGB and CMYK values on your computer are also just settings. And, just like the toasters, when they are sent to different devices, they produce different colors!

 

Now if you were a severe toast geek, you would toast 10 pieces of bread in your toaster; one at every setting. Then you would lay them all out in order on your kitchen table, grab the bag of bread and head over to your neighbor's. Avoiding his bewildered stares you would toast 10 pieces of bread in his toaster and take them back to lay on your table beside your toaster's work. Fanning through your Pantone? independent toast guide(*) you would decide that "B" was, in fact, the color of toast you prefer. Looking up and down your toaster column you would confirm that yes, indeed, "4" is the setting on your toaster that will get you the color you want - you know this after several mornings of frantically waving smoke away from the alarm on your kitchen ceiling. After looking over your neighbor's toaster column, you note that a setting of "6" is what is needed to get the color you want from his toaster."

 

By sampling what a device will do and comparing it to an independent guide for actual colour, accurate colour management between devices can be achieved. So how did all this come about? Well, if you managed to stay awake during physics class you might know that the human eye perceives colour as wave lengths of light entering the eye and hitting receptors that create electrical signals to the brain. The brain translates the wave lengths into what we call colour. The Comission Internationale de L'Eclairage (CIE) - not a commission for chocolate eclairs I might add - established a set of standards based on how the human eye interprets colours. They came up with this horseshoe shaped colour space in 1931.

 

 

 

The horseshoe colour space shows the full range of colour the human eye can see.