Killing Time

I knew this going in, but with the acquisition of a large format printer (the Epson 3880 – more on that later – so far very impressive) comes a whole ‘nuther skill set – color management. I’ve been poking around the edges of this without really doing much about it as long as I’ve been manipulating photos on the computer and creating web pages on the Internet. Now it’s time to get serious. In order to help me do that, I began looking at color calibration tools as soon as I started seriously considering the Epson. No sense having a nice printer like that if I can’t get the prints I expect to out of it.

After looking at several of the moderately priced systems, I finally settled on the Spyder3 Studio by Datacolor (they have a newer model out now – the Spyder3 Studio SR). Why? Mainly I liked what I was reading in the reviews, and the system could handle both ends of the process – monitor and printer – without breaking the budget.

Installation of the software and callibration of my laptop monitor was a breeze. I’m seeing variations of color in all my applications that were never there before. Subjectively, the results are great.

When it came time to try the printer callibration, I ran into a glitch in the Windows version of the software that made it impossible to proceed through reading the target pattern. That might have been an annoyance except that the technical support was the best I’ve ever received from any company I’ve ever dealt with in the 20+ years I’ve been working with computers. After exchanging several emails with David Miller, Senior Software Developer, there was a new release of the software published before I even had a chance to get home the next day. And then he went above and beyond and took a look at my first profile and made some suggestions.

In a world that has largely settled for mediocre in just about any area you might want to consider, Datacolor’s customer service is simply outstanding.

First rule, not original with me, is never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry.

Next rule, which was discovered on Tuesday and adopted immediately is:

Never make your shopping list when you’re hungry.

I ate lunch and then made my list this week and nothing looked quite as appetizing as it usually does, so my listed ended up about 1/4 the usual size. Not bad. Smaller list = less time involved in acquisition.

There are other rules that make this chore more bearable for those of us who don’t like to do it. The one kind of shopping I rather enjoy, though, is second hand shopping. I’ve stumbled onto brand new clothes with the tags still on for a fraction of the new price. Today, I happened to find the cloth napkins and placemats that match a table cloth I’ve had for about 4 years now and paid a grand total of $2.00 for the complete set of 4 of each. This I can deal with.

Of course, I’d still prefer to have things just magically appear in my cupboards so I could eliminate the chore altogether.