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.
