ColorMunki Photo - Monitor, Printer & Projector Profiler

Purchased it because of excellent reviews - also anxious to do my own printer profiles. However, it doesn't handle CRT monitors and that wasn't made clear prior to purchase. I had to send it back. I use both a CRT and an LCD and of the two the CRT has the best color gamut.

With 28 years as a professional photographer, I feel a mixture of delight and relief when I find a product that works so well and makes my job better and easier. Engineered for accuracy and ease of use...I love my Munki. I never had the time, but especially the patience, to profile papers the now old-fashioned way. And the Digital Pouch is quite a bonus when trying to help clients see the images correctly on their own monitors. Thank you X-Rite.

An excellent device. Does excellent calibration in "Easy" mode. For a little more precision and options use "Advanced" mode. It is especially easy to match monitor to printer.

First off, I'm no novice to color management, monitor profiling and ICC profile creation. Previously I had been using Monaco EZColor which was a great product with fantastic personalized tech support until X-Rite bought them and gutted both the product and support.

Anyway, I was really looking forward to ColorMunki so that I could get away from EZ Color's need for ITT target scanning and the laborious process required to create a monitor-paper profile. While the software installed easily and the proces of creating a monitor-paper profile went smoothly, the results were horrible on my new Canon Pixma Pro9000. Greenish casts to every profile, and worse, the default profile created for my monitor distorted all the colors. Unlike EZ Color, when you create a monitor profile with Munki, it does not use the RGB sliders found on most higher-end monitors, so there is no way to compensate for under or over bias on one color.

Calling X-Rite, while easy enough to get through, was a joke. The only positive I can say about the experience is that the call seemingly stayed in the US, but the tech support guy was essentially useless. When asked about how to correct my profile when using Photoshop CS3 he replied with the scripted answer that X-Rite does not support the use of their product with third party applications! Well, what good is making a profile if you can't utilize it in your post-processing software? He did take my e-mail and promise to send me some urls that might be pertainent to PS CS3 but as expected, the e-mail never arrived.

All in all, I was tremendously disappointed with ColorMunki. I had high expectataions that were dashed, surprsing for a $500 not-necessarily entry-level product.

ADDENDUM: In all fairness, I have to report that X-Rite read the above and contacted me by e-mail with an offer to assist me with the installation and usage of ColorMunki. And, interestingly, the next day I did receive a response from the original T.S. person (who I may have unfairly maligned in the above review) with a link to some assistance for CS3. I am away on a photo shoot at the time these e-mails arrived, so I will have to wait until I return to try out their assistance.

I've used a number of color calibration tools, and find the munki to be about the best for the money. (I use it on a Mac Pro with a 30" monitor and an HP B9180 printer.)

Color profiles are very tricky to use on the Mac, and even trickier on Windows. Basically, you need to make very, very sure that you're not correcting the image twice. In Lightroom, for example, there's a pulldown for whether LR or the printer manages its colors. Make sure your setting matches the printer driver's setup! (This is somewhat done for you on the Mac, but not on Windows.)

Lightroom is the easiest tool to use for printing, at least in my experience. Doing it from Photoshop is harder, and you often have to wrestle with the various settings to get it right.

Anyway, I believe this double-correction issue has more to do with the negative reviews than any problems with the device itself. The munki is very, very easy to use. A lot of stuff that would be a lot of work in other tools (e.g. color calibration targets) is all integral to the device, and well managed by the munki software. The profiles themselves are absolutely great -- at least for my setup.

Finally, if you care about getting photographs right -- both on screen and on paper -- a tool like the munki is essential. Editing photos on a well calibrated monitor will help ensure your photos will have a life beyond your current computer or screen. Imagine the trouble if you notice all your old pictures look a little greenish on your next computer. Which was right, your new machine or your old? And will you enjoy editing 5,000 pictures to fix the problem?

Bottom line: great tool for the dedicated amateur photographer. Everyone should at least calibrate their monitors. If a munki seems a little rich for your blood, then consider a Pantone Huey instead: Pantone huey MEU101