Ugra, the Swiss Center of Competence for Media and Printing Technology, released a tool that checks your monitor’s calibration and uniformity. At the end of the tests, you get a report that says whether your monitor is certified for softproofing or not. Few monitors are up to the Ugra’s stringent requirements. 

the UDACT tool checks monitor calibration, for which it compares the monitor profile with the actual colors on the monitor and it checks, if the monitor is able to display the color gamut of different printing conditions. My LaCie photon20vision lacks Gray Balance and, depending on the profile and the calibration, it also lacks a tad of softproof quality. Failing one of the three tests—the third being the profile quality—leads to a monitor that gets downgraded to “suitable for creative work only”.

Ugra’s Display Analysis and Certification Tool (UDACT) lets desktop publishers, graphic designers and prepress pros analyse, evaluate and certify for soft proofing environments. Ugra recommends that you first of all set up your environment lighting conditions to an optimum state. Then you should calibrate your monitor to a white point of 5000 to 6000K, with a luminance of at least 120 cd/square meter, and a gradation curve of 1.8 gamma.

Doing so will guarantee that you have the minimum conditions under which you can start softproofing. However, as quickly (and disappointedly) becomes clear, these conditions are far from enough. The workflow is that you first calibrate and profile your monitor, then run UDACT.

UDACT normally comes on a USB stick that acts as a dongle as well. My copy was a time-limited soft-version. The software offers you a startup screen where you select your measurement device. This can be an Eye-One Display, a Sequel colorimeter, a Spyder2Pro, or a MonacoOptix XR2 (DTP94-LCD, as it is called here). I chose the latter.

The next tab is the Calibration Check tab. The tab enables you to calibrate your colorimeter, then measure colour patches in the center of the screen. As soon as the measurements have all been done, the software becomes available again. The next tab lets you measure the monitor’s uniformity. For this, you will have to place your colorimeter on white patches in six different areas of the screen.

And now for the Marks!

When this is over, you’re done. The thrilling moment comes when you click the Summary tab, and see that your monitor complies with Ugra’s stringent requirements… or not. As I said earlier, mine did not, but I re-ran the test a couple of times, each time with a different calibration setting. This allowed me to improve on the results.

The Summary screen shows you three sliders, which represent a rough estimate of what has been measured. The true value of UDACT lies in the PDF report that you can generate. This report—you can download a sample of my LaCie results here—shows you in detail how different your monitor is from the standard Ugra lives by.

I asked Ugra’s CEO whether a lot of monitors certify. The answer was “not a lot”. Only about 20 models will certify, but Ugra hasn’t finished testing all the monitors on the market yet. I will be testing mine further, with different settings of luminance, just to make sure it doesn’t certify after all.

One thing UDACT does, is to get you out of your illusion with regards to softproofing images in Photoshop and the likes. UDACT now costs 240.00 Euros. From October onwards, it will cost 290.00 Euros. You can buy the tool online.