Color changing car

Welcome to a brand new year - new color technology!

BMW unveiled a color-changing car which uses E-ink, similar to how the Kindle reader screen works. This does not emit light, but reflects light and allows items like ebooks (and this car's color) to be visible in broad daylight. The demo car is limited to a black and white palette, but they claim that the technology can be expanded to include colors. The idea is that you can change the color of your car according to your mood.  

I wonder if you can program it to be "black" to absorb heat when it's cold outside - and white in the summer?

https://twitter.com/Newegg/status/1479181686101671936

https://twitter.com/hashtag/BMWEInk

ColorThink as Art

We always love to see how our software is used in your work.   I was browsing the website for Eizo displays and was surprised to find a screenshot of our ColorThink Pro software among the scrolling slides on their homepage. 

https://www.eizo.com/home/#

Evidently a marketing person at Eizo is making use of the beauty of these colorful 3D gamuts as seen in the ColorThink Pro 3D Grapher.  Sometimes we forget how beautiful color is!

JVH Digital Festival coming in October

If you are in the State of Washington in early October, make plans on coming to the:

JVH Digital Festival

October 3, 2019
Bellevue Washington

The Harrington family are a top-notch dealer for large format inkjet printers in the local Seattle market.  They are generously hosting this free educational event for their customers and anyone who is interested in learning more about printing, photography and color management.  Pat Herold of CHROMiX will be one of the speakers, teaching a beginner's session on color management. 

The JVH festivals are always fun, worthwhile events - packed with practical information for the small photography or printing business.   If you are in Washington, you don't want to miss this!

You can even enter your printed artwork or photography in the print contest.

The event is free, but please contact them to register ahead of time. 

http://www.jvhtech.com/festival.php

CHROMiX on NEC Google+ hangout

Hey everyone… I just spent an hour discussing color management on the NEC Google+ hangout panel. It was a live discussion and a YouTube video recording is available at NEC Google+ hangout discussion. Check it out!

Black and white display

Maybe this seems rather regressive, but in a day and age when people are using their phones to send text messages, this could be the next Big Thing.

Did you know you can calibrate an Eizo to produce a perfectly black and white display? I didn't. A recent post in ColorForums got me doing some research in this vein.  There are a couple of ways to do this.  One is to create an RGB profile in Photoshop but define the primary colors using very low-chroma primary colors.  Eizo's ColorNavigator software can be called in to emulate that profile on their display and you end up with a mostly black and white display.  An even better way to get a more completely neutral result is to go into the ColorNavigator advanced feature that allows you to independently adjust contrast, saturation and such on 6 colors.   I removed all saturation, re-calibrated, and now have a perfectly calibrated black and white display.   (I wonder if I can get 'I love Lucy' on this...?)

Eizo profiles iPads

I just discovered that Eizo has added a procedure for profiling tablet displays, phones, etc. to their new ColorNavigator software.  They call it Media Emulation.  ColorNavigator is the free profiling software that works with their higher-end monitors like the "CG" series. With this feature, you can choose an option for "Create ICC profile for tablet/display device..." and the software will send a series of color patches to a web site that your tablet can access. As you place your measurement instrument on the portable display, ColorNavigator will read the colors and create an ICC profile.

Now you have a means of profiling these displays even though you cannot connect a USB measurement device directly to them! You can use the resulting profile to "soft-proof" what your images will look like when they are viewed on these displays. Available on the latest version of ColorNavigator (version 6.1.1).

Datacolor announces the Spyder4

Just when you think X-Rite has cornered the market on display calibrators with its new i1 Display Pro, here comes Datacolor with a new Spyder4!

This new device has 7 color sensors instead of the the usual 3.  The software has added capability to do uniformity testing, better matching of multiple monitors, and they will be providing some means of correcting color on an iPhone/iPad.


I'll be looking forward to testing this in the future.

http://download.datacolor.eu/newsletter/2012-01-05-US/

Munki confusion

Since X-Rite has come out with a new model of colorimeter for calibrating monitors, I just know this is going to confuse people, so I thought I'd explain things. Internally, X-Rite refers to the device as the "i1D3" to reflect how it is intended to replace the i1 Display 2. But this single device comes in two different models:

1. - i1 Display Pro
2. - ColorMunki Display

The i1Display Pro is nothing like the "i1 Pro" - and -

The ColorMunki Display is nothing like the "ColorMunki"

The i1Pro instrument is a well-known spectrophotometer, and can be used to make printer profiles as well as monitor profiles. Let's try not to talk about the "i1 Pro" when we really mean the i1 Display Pro.

Also, the ColorMunki display is an entirely different device from what most people refer to as a ColorMunki device - which is a low-end spectrophotometer for calibrating displays and printers.

The i1Display Pro and the ColorMunki Display are identical in form, but the basic difference is that the i1Display Pro is faster and more expensive, and the ColorMunki Display is slower and costs less. http://blog.chromix.com/2011/06/x-rites-i1display-pro-colormunki.html

Lion bites ICC profiles

With the release of Apple's new OS X Lion operating system (10.7), there is a new twist that affects those who use ICC profiles. If you have trouble finding your ICC profiles, it is because the users' Library folder is hidden in the new OS. On the Mac, most ICC profiles are stored in ColorSync/Profiles folders, either in the username/Library/ColorSync/profiles, or the HD/Library/ColorSync/Profiles folders. Any software that relies on being able to access and write to the user's folder is going to have trouble with Lion. For example, several monitor calibration applications are able to save any monitor profile they make, but then will not accurately reflect the new profile as being in place as the system profile. Most of these vendors are scrambling to get a new version of their software out to take care of this situation. In the meantime, you can generally get into the settings area of your app and tell it to save your profiles elsewhere - in the HD/Library... location for example.

To access the user's Profiles folders directly under Lion, hold down the alt/option button on the keyboard while you navigate to Go in the main Finder menu. This will make the username/Library folder visible.

i1Profiler version 1.1.1 now available

X-Rite just released version 1.1.1 of i1Profiler on June 28th. This version has a few improvements in how it performs monitor calibrations:

• You can choose between small (119), medium (220) and large (478) patch sets when doing advanced display calibration.

• You can now specify a contrast ratio in order for the display to match the ICC standard PCS black point (287:1).

• You can now use the contrast ratio of a printer profile as the target contrast ratio for a display profile.

• They've made miscellaneous bug fixes that seems to be making the whole program more stable according to early reports from users.

Besides the new features, X-Rite is also reporting a list of known issues and important points to be aware of. Every user of i1profiler would find this well worth reading:

http://www.xrite.com/product_overview.aspx?ID=1397&Action=support&SupportID=5503

Can speakers ruin a monitor?

If you have speakers sitting on your desktop, next to your computer screen, can they damage your monitor or affect its color?

The thought is that audio speakers have magnets in them, and these magnets if they are too big or unshielded can have an immediate effect on the color of a monitor that uses magnetic fields. Colors and shapes will be bent into strange patterns near the location of the magnet. Sounds scary, doesn't it?!

While there is a measure of truth to this rumor, here are a few points to keep in mind:

• This problem only effects CRT displays, not the modern LCD which uses a completely different technology.
• This only happens when the speaker has a big enough magnet and is close enough to effect the CRT.
• You can tell immediately if this distortion is taking place, and remove the speaker from the proximity of the display.
• If you notice any lasting effects of this magnetic interference, you can run your CRT through its "de-gaussing" routine, and it should come back to normal (newer CRTs run a degauss every time they are turned on.)
  

Monitor reviews NEC PA241W & PA271W

I have just completed extensive reviews of two new displays from NEC: the PA241W and PA271W. Link to these reviews here:
PA241W review
PA271W review

While there are many places to get monitor reviews on the internet, these are mainly aimed toward the "gaming" crowd. At CHROMiX, most of our customers are professional & semi-professional photographers and other high end color specialists with a unique set of requirements for displays. Our reviews include:

• analysis of size and shape of color gamut,
• how consistent the color is across the screen,
• calibration options,
• analysis of the display when calibrated to the requirements of a photographer (which is usually much lower in brightness than other purposes.)

We write up reviews which are intended to answer the questions our customers will have, so I hope you will find them useful. Browse the ColorWiki for other reviews as well. We have articles that range from products to technology to techniques, and we add more whenever we come across something new. Look for the "Tools" section.

Color on the Web

Brian Lawler's excellent Blognosticator blog has a great entry about color management in web browsers.

For a good browser test you should also check out this page at the ICC's site which also tests for ICC v4 compliance. (a new version of the ICC profile format that is slow in being supported)

Color management in web browsers is actually quite a complicated thing. Web browsers are not just image viewers but are much more like InDesign and Quark. They are image and content aggregators (not to mention application platforms). So even though an image may contain a profile and the browser may display it properly, many or all of the other elements on the page may not display properly. In many layouts and designs, incomplete color management is worse than none.

We will continue to research, report and supply solutions to color in the digital display realm, so stay tuned.