The ColorVision PrintFIX Pro is a spectrophotometer to build printer colour profiles and which sells at a low price of approx. 600 Euros. That could imply the unit and its software are not up to the job of measuring colour accurately. But jumping to such a conclusion would be dead-wrong. The PrintFIX Pro may be cheap, but it does measure correctly and builds accurate and useful colour profiles for printers, their inks and the media you use to print. At this price, a ColorVision PrintFIX Pro should be in every desktop publisher, photographer, and graphics designer’s tool chest.

When a renowned digital photographer like David Cardinal states that when he compared the results from PrintFIX Pro profiles to those he generated with Gretag ProfileMaker 4.1 and an Eye-One the results were very close, there must be some truth to the PrintFIX Pro being a good spectrophotometer solution. It is quite a tribute to PrintFIX Pro from such a photographer, as it is the only sub $1000 package he said to ever have tested which can really go toe to toe with one of the high-end packages.

I tested the PrintFIX Pro with the different measurement targets it offers. There are three to choose from: a low-quality 150 patches measurement target, a high-quality 225 patches target and a high-quality 729 patches target. I used two different printers: the old HP Photosmart 8750 and a pre-production unit of the yet to be released HP Photosmart Pro B9180. I used HP’s matte and Premium satin paper and HP’s DesignJet Advanced glossy paper for use with the new Vivera pigment inks.

But before I tell you how it all went, let’s first examine the box. The box is, in fact, a beautiful black vinyl box that is designed to keep the PrintFIX Pro --and if you buy the Pro Suite, a Spyder2Pro-- cleanly, securely and neatly tucked away for its lifetime. Inside the box is a Quick Start Guide, a CD containing the software and a USB cable. The PrintFIX measuring device itself sits on a calibration cradle with a black and a white patch to calibrate the spectrophotometer against.

The software installs no special drivers. When starting the software, the PrintFIX Pro should be connected and sitting on its cradle. In the PrintFIX Pro calibration software Preferences there is an option to calibrate the spectrophotometer. This takes less than a minute. Another feature that’s in the Preferences --an odd place for it-- is the capability to measure coloured surfaces. This feature is actually very useful to determine your paper’s white point, a measurement you will later need when making profiles.

Spectrophotometer software: determinating factor for quality

I’ve never realised this before, but the spectrophotometer by itself is not the most important of a printer/ink/paper calibration and/or profiling tool. It’s the software. Of course the spectrophotometer should be accurate and capable of measuring values accurately, within specific limits, but the software really determines how good a profile for a certain paper will turn out to be.

So, when I started using the ColorVision PrintFIX Pro software, it struck me as no surprise that it resembled that of the Spyder2Pro colorimeter. That is no criticism, because I find that software to actually work very well. However, I also find the interface of the ColorVision tools could do with a bit more sex-appeal and be a bit more user-friendly. On the other hand, with every step, help is only a mouse click away, so what more could I ask for?

With the PrintFIX Pro, the process workflow is even better documented in the interface than is the case with the Spyser2Pro. There’s only that (in my opinion at least) ugly interface. Anyway, the software guides you through the calibration or perhaps more accurately, profiling process. For a printer, this means in the case of ColorVision, that you start with printing a test sheet to have some sort of “before” look you can return to after the profile has been built. The second step is to print test patches for each rendering intent you want to profile for.

In the Help file you can read how to interpret the colour patches. In my case I had a perfect printer and a near-perfect printer in terms of colour accuracy. The third step, and most important one, is measuring the colour patches that make out the target you’re going to base your profile on. There are three choices here --and I tried all of them: a 150 patches low-quality target, a 225 patches high-quality target and a 720 high-quality target.

One of the omissions in the PrintFIX Pro package which helps explain for the low price, is the lack of a plastic guidance ruler of some sort. Measuring the patches is very much a process of patience and good muscle control. Especially with the 720 patches target on an A3 sheet, the patches get very small and the spectrophotometer by itself is rather bulky so you can’t really see well what you’re doing. The actual measuring tip is small enough, but the trouble is you are looking at the large back of the device.