Colour management is probably among the most important and least understood technologies designers and publishers have to cope with. Monitor calibration and profiling is no exception. To do it right, you need expensive equipment and arcane software. Not true, says Pantone, which now is an integral part of the X-Rite family. The Huey Pro is a calibration system developed by Pantone to make monitor calibration a breeze. But how accurate is it?

The Huey Pro is a small plastic stick-form colorimeter. It has a set of red LEDs and a set of small suction pads designed to hold the light-weight stick to the surface of your monitor. The suction pads have been designed to avoid damage to your LCD monitor. With the Huey Pro comes a cradle that holds the stick when you’re allowing the Huey Pro to accommodate for ambient room lighting.

Calibrating the monitor with the Huey Pro is very easy, but introduces an element of uncertainty: you must judge the monitor’s contrast and lightness settings visually. The human eye has been proven utterly unreliable for such tasks, so the calibration of your monitor will not be as accurate as it could be when the Huey Pro would measure the settings you apply --as it’s done with our Editor’s Choice, the basICColor display software.

Ambient Light Adjustment

Nevertheless, the whole calibration process is very fast. At the end of it, you’ll get the option to keep the Huey Pro in its cradle and have it measure ambient light constantly. The stick and software combination will then adjust the monitors brightness level according to the ambient light level.

When the calibration process was finished, the screen looked fine, although the light areas were too light compared to my reference profile made with display 4.1.8. A checkup of the profile with ColorThink Pro revealed the Huey Pro system managed to go deeper into the shadow areas, but the gamut was smaller than the reference profile.

All in all, I wasn’t too disappointed, especially considering the Huey Pro’s price and target group --mainly amateur photographers and beginning colour enthusiasts. What I would advise to people using the Huey Pro system, however, is to turn off ambient light adjustment. The whole idea of monitor calibration is to get a system with known, “fixed” parameters to which you should be adjusting your ambient light conditions, and not the other way around.

It is currently unclear to me whether X-Rite has decided to phase out the Huey Pro, as it has been doing with some of its own equipment after it acquired GretagMacbeth.