Brother MFC-9840CDW Color Calibration

A little more info on the Spyder 3 Studio vs. ColorMunki Design.

http://spyder.datacolor.com/pdfs/CI-303%20Calibrating-S.pdf

A possible big drawback for the Studio's print measuring device is time. You read in one patch at a time manually with the hand held unit. If you use the maximum color patch set of seven hundred some colors, it can easily take a few hours to read them all in. I know, I've done that with an X-Rite DTP-22. It's not much fun.

I assume you mean you're trying to profile it? Though it is also called calibration at times.

Anyway, one of the least expensive methods is with X-Rite's ColorMunki Design package. It can be found for around $400 at amazon.com, which includes the ColorMunki spectrophotometer and software. There's some good information on it here. It also explains the minor differences between the Design and Photo packages.

If you want to go nuts, there's the iSis auto scanning spectrophotometer bundled with either Monaco Profiler or the ProfileMaker software. Either combo will set you back around $5,000. So yes, the ColorMunki bundle is a cheap profiling option.

Hi Kelly,

Note that the first two reviews were from Windows users. Installation of the software is very easy on the Mac. So forget about the "long installation of Net Framework." Other items have merit. Let's list them by usage.

1) Monitors. Colorimeters like the DTP-94, Spyder 3 and other similar units are having a tough time with newer monitors. They are simply too bright and saturated for most of them to handle. The Spyder 3 (which I use for our LaCie 324) does well, mostly because it many more sensors than previous versions or other models. The ColorMunki is a spectrophotometer, which can easily handle the luminance and color output of just about anything. The downside? The software recognizes if your monitor supports DDC and uses it whether you want it to or not. There's no way to tell it not to. Since DDC doesn't work correctly for our monitor with anything other than LaCie's own profiling software, I can't use the ColorMunki for the 324. That's not an issue with the ColorMunki software, lot's of DDC monitor manufacturers use their own proprietary implementation of DDC, which prevents anything other than their own profiling software to work correctly with their monitors.

2) Scanners or digital cameras. No possible way to profile them with ColorMunki.

3) Digital projectors. I don't have one, but it's nice to know I can profile them with the ColorMunki. Also of course can't tell you how well it does with them.

4) Okay, the biggie. Printers. As you saw on the review I linked to, profiling printers with the ColorMunki uses a very limited 50 color patch target. It then does a second sheet to handle colors that aren't matching well to fine tune them. A major point made in the third review on Amazon is profiling your printer correctly. That means making sure you turn off ALL color management when printing the target sheet. The whole point of profiling anything is to capture how that device displays or sees or produces color on its own with NO modification of the data being captured or sent to it in any way. If you don't do that, you may as well hit yourself in the head with a brick since you won't get any acceptable results. Software such as Monaco Profiler or ProfileMaker are much more advanced (they can use thousands of colors in a patch set) and will make much more accurate profiles, but also cost it. Since I have Monaco Profiler and an auto scanning spectrophotometer, that's what I use for profiling printers.

I myself purchased the ColorMunki for one reason. To replace the almost completely obsolete DTP-22 hand held spectrophotometer we had for reading in surface colors. Glad we did, the ColorMunki is much better.

For the price (and it's about as low as you'll find for anything that will profile a printer), the ColorMunki is a good buy.

Since I hadn't tried it yet, I wanted to actually profile a printer with the ColorMunki before answering. The results on (the difficult to profile) HP 2605dn color laser printer; decent, but nothing great. Most colors were a pretty good on screen match, others stunk. Solid magenta turned a dusty rose, bright lavender, an obvious blue.

Overall, kind of disappointing when the same image using a canned setup in the print dialogue actually did better. But then, this isn't a good printer to use as an example. Even the Monaco software doesn't come up with a very good profile for the 2605. It's the best of the bunch, but nothing I'd use for color evaluation. Unfortunately, I don't have anything else to test on. Our Epson Stylus Pro 4000 can really only be used with the ColorBurst RIP in OS X, 10.5.x. Epson put out very limited drivers for this model in Leopard.

Heck, you'd probably be better of with the Spyder 3 Studio package. For only $455 at Amazon, you get the Spyder 3 colorimeter and profiling software and hardware for your printers. Click on the "What you get" tab at this link to see everything it comes with.

I can't vouch for the results you'd get for printer profiles with this package, but I would imagine they're at least comparable to the ColorMunki. Don't be concerned that it's geared towards RGB driven printers. All consumer level color printers profile as an RGB device, even though they use CMYK inks.