Philip

I’ve been cruising out the latest ColorMunki web pages at X-Rite where they have a colour hue test that you can take to test your ability to distinguish colours. The good news for me is I’m pretty much spot on able to distinguish hues properly (only a few mistakes!) which is good since I spend time calibrating my monitor and I’m pretty sensitive when things are off.

Try for yourself here but be warned it’s got an email register signup. I’ve got a ColorMunki in the mail on the way from USA since they want to charge a gob-smacking $695 RRP in Australia vs a more respectable $400 US + shipping.

The good thing about the ColorMunki is that it’s by X-Rite/Pantone and they generally make good gear and don’t skimp on the hardware, only the software. Usually, the sensors they use are all top notch and the software is what costs a lot, since it supports additional features and advanced analysis of the results.

What makes the ColorMunki useful is that it combines a display and printer calibrator in one spectrophotometer that can handle most of the requirements of the prosumer market to match your monitor to your printer and optionally to your camera shoot environment. I’ll write up more about it when I get it in and tested.

However, for interest I’ve been printing off some photos… unfortunately the results haven’t been that great so I’ve needed to get a colour calibrator in to fix it properly to make it match what I see on the screen.

Recently I picked up a Canon PIXMA iP4500 since it’s about the only decently priced inkjet that will print direct onto CD/DVD’s without much hassle. Since my writing skills have degraded and my friends complain that reading my hand written labels on discs is nigh-on-impossible it’s a good purchase idea. You simply fold out the specially designed inner front tray, pop the disc onto the plastic carrier and slide it in for the printer to access. After some aligning the disc goes in and gets printed onto.

Output slightly bleeds into the disc but it’s perfectly legible since I don’t consider discs to be excellent as a printable surface. The main thing is that the printing works, Canon gives you Mac OS X and Windows software to make it easy to set up and has all the presets for getting the disc done. I was eyeing up a HP Photosmart D5360 that could also do it, but the general feel was a bit flimsier than the Canon and felt like it could break apart easily.