By: Erik Vlietinck
Wed, December 12, 2007 - 2:19:01

http://www.lafot.com
Score:

Poland isn’t exactly known for its elegant design, but it is well-known for its equipment robustness and above all: accuracy. We don’t readily associate precision instruments with robustness, but in the case of Lafot, the monitor calibration instrument that is commercialised under the totally not-sexy name of “Lafot Monitor Control LMC 03”, is certainly a precision instrument worthy of that name. Lafot’s core business not being monitor calibration, the software that goes with the LMC 03 was still in beta when I last saw it, but it was stable and feature-complete, and running fine on Tiger (I am waiting for the Leopard version). After having tested the LMC 03 for some months, my conclusion is that it is better than the best monitor measuring instrument X-Rite has ever made --the DTP94.

Lafot is a company that has a long-standing experience with the development and manufacturing of photo minilabs --both analogue and digital. For those contraptions, Lafot needed some good tools to calibrate their equipment. The company created the LMC 03 colorimeter instrument as a spin-off of their existing activities. Poland now being a proud member of the European Union --which if anything, still is an economic reality-- Lafot decided to make the LMC 03 into an all-round monitor measuring instrument.

First the bad news --and I promise, it will be short: you don’t buy the Lafot LMC 03 for its good looks; the best description is that of a greyish brick. End of the bad news. Now for the good and the excellent…

The LMC 03 System

The LMC 03 is made of thick, sturdy plastic. It has a screw opening at the top side. That’s where the counter weight fits in. With counter weight, I do mean counter weight. The other end has the USB connection. The side facing the monitor screen has a soft, rubber-like padding. You hang the LMC 03 with the USB cable facing downward and the padding (obviously) flush against the monitor.

Except for the counter weight, the LMC 03 comes in a black synthetic leather padded enclosure --a nice touch and a preview of the quality that you’ll be experiencing-- that holds the instrument, the software on an 8cm CD, and a semitransparent white disc for measuring ambient light.

The software CD should be replaced with either a USB stick or a regular CD. The CD wouldn’t mount on Tiger, nor on Leopard. On Tiger the beta ran smoothly. The software has a no-frills look (a bit reminiscent of the seventies), but is well-designed in terms of help to get you through the steps for successfully calibrating, and the feature completeness.

Basically, the whole procedure of measurement can be assistant-driven by clicking the Question MArk icons throughout the interface, and a lot of feedback is offered. I would say the software is not as well-designed as basICColor 4.x, but it is far better than i1-Match or ProfileMaker Pro. The LMC 03 can be used to measure ambient light by adding the white disc to the aperture --the tiny hole in the brick. The measurement of ambient light is continuous and in real-time, and the software gives you all the parameters in real time (lightness and temperature), so that the LMC 03 in fact becomes a full-blown light meter.

Measuring a monitor’s characteristics starts with setting the gamma, background luminance and colour temperature. This is done in an interface that clearly shows you what each option does. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that a novice will find it easy, but the interface certainly does not work against you --quite on the contrary. 

Pre-Calibration and Post-Calibration

The pre-calibration, for example, shows you the distance of the measured values in relation to the desired values by way of red, orange and green “LEDs” on-screen. In other high-end applications, this information is by default kept either hidden from the user (as in ProfileMaker) or shown in number values only (as with basICColor display 4.x). Lafot went the extra mile by showing you when you’ve adjusted enogh for leaving the danger zone, so to speak.

Once the profile has been created, you get a chance to edit it further. That was the least attractive feature to me. I don’t think you should be allowed to edit a monitor profile at all, because it just takes too much expertise for most of us. Besides, the whole idea of monitor calibration is that you don’t have to adjust the colours afterwards. The wrong message is being sent to the user here, because the measurements are accurate.

As it is now, you might conclude that the profile surely can’t be good enough, or that Lafot doesn’t trust its own instrument. Now, I’m sure that’s not the case, but it gives that impression. On top of that, editing profiles is something you should not do unless you really, really can’t afford the minutes it takes to re-profile. Even the late Bruce Fraser would agree with me there. Except for this detail, however, Lafot’s software works excellent under Tiger, with profiles being generated very fast. Two or multiple-monitor systems are supported as well.

The resulting profiles largely depend on your understanding of the interface. I was capable, after a couple of failures, to create profiles that only slightly differed from the ones that I create with basICColor’s display 4.x, a profiling system which I tend to use as a reference because of its ultra-high standards and accuracy. While with ProfileMaker and i1-Match the profile almost always results in a much to brightly set screen, basICColor display 4.x manages to create a profile with lightness set at the closest values my older LaCies are capable of.

The Lafot LMC 03 and its software gave me just a bit more (actually: a bit easier) control over lightness, with the profiles matching those from display 4.x very closely. In Chromix’s ColorThink Pro I could see bit of a difference between the distribution of darker colours in the two profiles, where display’s profile managed to get more out of the monitor in the dark colours, but only by a margin.

After having made about a dozen profiles and becoming more familiar with the Lafot software, the differences were no longer noticeable.

I’m convinced the Lafot calibration system should be given a fat thumbs up, as it clearly can produce very accurate profiles. But I consulted my good friend Karl Koch, the developer of display 4.x and the L-Star colour space. He told me he thought the Lafot instrument to superior to anything else currently on the market. The only thing he finds lightly disturbing is that Lafot doesn’t release a Mac SDK, so he could hook into the instrument with his own product.