X-Rite and Pantone jointly announced and released a new colour management / colour measurement system with some innovative features. Two versions were released: ColorMunki Design and ColorMunki Photo. Pantone sent me one of the first ColorMunki Design systems available. I’ll receive a ColorMunki Photo later on. The differences between the two systems are entirely attributable to the software. While the Design version focusses strongly on spot colour management, the Photo version focusses more on skin colours, black and white profiling and a completely new exchange model for photos.

ColorMunki Design is the first version I’m going to discuss here. The ColorMunki Design is a complete colour management and measurement system in a box. The measurement device is a spectrophotometer with a special industrial design and a synthetic cloth container. This protective cover acts as a protection for the measurement device and also as a counterweight for the instrument when calibrating and profiling a display. The cloth cover has a sort of heavy neck strap to carry the device around.

I have some criticism with regards to the protective cover. First of all, the ColorMunki device has a large rotating knob with a press button at one side. Both sides remain exposed, even when the ColorMunki is kept in its holder. The device being of sturdy plastic, I don’t believe it will break easily, but you will get scratches on the sides fairly rapidly, if you’re not careful.

The ColorMunki Spectrophotometer

The container acts as a holder for profiling a display. To that purpose, there’s a special hard-plastic compartment in the container with a hole that can be slid open or closed. The ColorMunki not always lines up properly without exerting some slight pressure until it settles on the display. As far as the holder is concerned, I love its design in terms of eye-candy, but while it’s not too bad in terms of usability, it could be better. To round up this part of the review, I also think X-Rite and Pantone should definitely rethink the whole box. In my opinion, people should be able to keep the ColorMunki in something that easily stores and can withstand some small abuse in handling.

The ColorMunki itself is a spectrophotometer which means it measures both emissive and reflective material. Indeed, with the ColorMunki you can measure a display, a projector, ambient light, and printed colour. I received the actual technical details from Pantone, and while I can’t disclose these I can tell you the ColorMunki --on paper, judging from the technical differences list-- performs slightly worse than an Eye-One Pro. One thing that I can disclose is that ColorMunki is UV-Cut only, while the Eye-One Pro may be used in either UV-Cut or without filter mode.

The overall accuracy of the ColorMunki has a slightly worse average deltaE (differences measured between measurements taken) than the Eye-One Pro. Of course, technical data sheets are interesting, but it’s the practical result that counts. I performed a number of tests that showed the ColorMunki Design is certainly no toy, and its technical details may be less “pro” than those of the Eye-One Pro, the main difference really is in the versatility the Eye-One Pro offers. The ColorMunki is less versatile and more error-prone than the Eye-One Pro because of some of its industrial design (e.g. some angles of attack may cause errors with ColorMunki, and not with Eye-One Pro).

However, that doesn’t make ColorMunki a less capable device, simply because it’s intended to work only within the context of ColorMunki Design software. Before tackling the software, I would like to go back to the results for a moment. I expected the ColorMunki to be slightly worse at caibrating and profiling the monitor than a X-Rite DTP94 or even an Eye-One Display II. The latter two measurement devices are colorimeters, and colorimeters are better at measuring emissive light than spectrophotometers.

Profiling displays and printers

That proved to be correct, but not the way I thought it would. When I calibrate my display using basICColor combined with a DTP94, the resulting calibration and profile give me a very large dynamic range. Especially the dark areas still carry a lot of detail. Also, the infamous Black Level test as described in Bruce Fraser’s Real World Colour Management (the bible on colour management) gives an excellent result with me only having to boost four levels upwards before the square becomes visible.

According to the late Bruce Fraser, most calibration systems will force you to open up the levels to at least level five before you’ll see the square, so basICColor --which truly calibrates your monitor-- does a great job. I ran the same test with the ColorMunki display profiles and much to my surprise, the Black Level test gave the same result. On the three other tests that I ran, and which included an analysis using ColorThink Pro’s worksheet, the ColorMunki Design display profile was on par with the results form basICColor’s display 4.x.

The results were slightly different, but only slightly. I got these results because I left the monitor’s Lightness values unchanged. You can have ColorMunki Design calibrate and profile your display in two modes: Easy and Advanced. In the Easy mode, no adjustments are made to the monitor using its OSD (On-Screen Display) controls. In the Advanced mode, you can set Contrast and Lightness levels manually --if the monitor will let you.

ColorMunki Design supports all types of monitors, including DDC monitors such as certain types of Eizo monitors, where the calibration process involves adjusting the monitor hardware automatically. I couldn’t test ColorMunki Design with such high-end monitor, but on an older LaCie monitor, the results were as I described earlier --but only if I left the lightness in its default state, which is too high according to ColorMunki’s own assessment.

When I used ColorMunki’s advice and set the lightness level to what it required from me, the dark areas were much less detailed and the Black Level test faired one level worse. The lesson to be learned from this is that you should not thoughtlessly accept whatever a measurement system tells you, unless you’ve experimented before and found its advice to be spot-on. The software supports ambient light measurement as part of the display profiling process, as well as D50 and D65.