Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
ColorMunki Photo is the innovative way to bring your photos from screen to print with color perfection. Designed for wedding, social, or portrait photographers, this color control solution delivers technological features for display, projector, and RGB/CMYK printer profiling. You'll now be able to send your images to your clients, confident that they will be viewed in a calibrated environment, using the DigitalPouch communication tool. All this delivered in an all-in-one integrated solution with a streamlined interface, making the most of your digital workflow. All-in-One spectrophotometer means no separate devices needed to profile your displays and printers. ColorMunki lets you swing perfectly from screen to print with quick, easy, and accurate display-to-print match. Software guides you through whichever profiling function you desire. Select 'Match My Printer To My Display' and you'll be completely guided through the profiling process for both your display and your printer. ColorMunki can calibrate multiple displays with ease and provides before and after visualization, as well as calibration reminder prompts. ColorMunki's superfast scanning can rapidly measure test charts in less than one minute. With AppSet, ColorMunki talks with your photo and design applications to automate printer profile settings. ColorMunki automatically extracts the top colors, or you can go directly into your image and add any color to your palette. With ColorMunki's PrintSafe checking capabilities, you'll be able to preview your color palettes under different lighting sources or printing processes before you go to production.

Rating : - Do Your Homework First!
I've had the ColorMunki for a couple months now. I really hate to write bad reviews on what seems to potentially be a great product, so I've waited until I cooled down some. But this product has a variety of problematic issues and is not for the color management novice.

I bought it based on reviews I had read about it which were mostly very good. If, when you install the software and create a monitor profile and if it installs without problems, and if you can figure out how to locate and set up the new profile as your default profile, and if you can figure out that you will need to change all the manual settings on your monitor, and if you know what to do when your monitor finally looks great but your printed photos look worse than ever...then you may be pleased.

However, from start to finish (if you can actually finish, which I haven't been able to do yet), I had one problem after another. It took me two days to get it to work on my laptop (Vista Premium) and another two days to get it to work on my desktop (XP). I will follow up later with examples of how poorly written the instructions are. The entire "manual" for installing the software and calibrating monitors, printers and projectors is not much more than 3-5 sentences for each type of hardware. Important steps are left out. The elementary school student drawings in the paper manual and online video tutorial, don't always match up with the instructions. The instructions should not be followed in the order that they are written, but you need to figure out how to move forwards and backwards from page to page to figure out what you are really supposed to do in what sequence.

Their website is one of the most amateurish designed sites you have ever seen and trying to find trouble-shooting help information is a long tedious process and you get answers like "if you get error code you may need third party software". That's it! It doesn't tell you why you get the error, what the error code means, or what kind of 3rd party software you need. You are on you own!

You can't even use this $500 device unless they have your phone number. You have to be connected to the internet to connect to their website to get them your phone number but the registration form you have to complete first wouldn't work on Windows IE. Before you can access their website for installation you have to select "ACTIVATE" but that button won't function until you REGISTER and that keeps freezing. I had to uninstall the software multiple times just to get to their website and register there before getting the software to come up onscreen.

Also, you are limited to 3 "unique" devices. So, if it doesn't work well on one of your devices, too bad, you only have two activations left.

If, the software doesn't install correctly, or if the calibrator freezes up, you are told the problem may be that you need to change your Vista Premium settings and change them to Vista Basic. Then you are told you need to change your computer settings in different places from their high performance to lower performance settings. After doing all these changes you find out that they had nothing to do with why the installation wasn't working and you have to try and remember all the changes you made so you can go back and restore them.

I emailed them for help (they even make locating their email support address almost impossible to find on their website). I got a response the next day (that's pretty good) but their response seemed to be answering a different question than I had asked.

I replied back to their email and directly cited where their manual and their tutorial images did not match up and asked what I should do about one of the frequent error messages that prevent the color management calibration from completing. I haven't heard from them since, that was two months ago.

Fortunately, I know a professional color management consultant who helped me get my monitor profiled. The result is really nice, it never looked so good. But, even he couldn't figure out how to get my Epson RX680 printer to color match what I see on my monitor. (I use Photoshop). Although the color improvement in both my laptop and my desktop monitors looks very good, I have them sitting beside each other and the same image looks different on each one. So far, the two computers and the printer, all look nice but none of the different units match each other's colors.

You should find their website, xrite.com, take a look at their "manual" and their trouble shooting "faqs" and especially their "video tutorials" and have a good laugh before you shell out so much money. Make sure that whoever you buy this unit from will take it back if you don't like it!

I'll try calling them and see if I get any meaningful help and will update this review later. I hope I'll have better news to share.