Gadget knows what colour's what

EVEN SUPPOSEDLY identical monitor displays will vary in the way they reproduce colour and any given monitor will change over time as its components age.

The Eye-One Display 2 from Pantone is a device that measures exactly what your monitor is doing so your software can be sure that what's displayed is what was intended, writes Paul Monckton.

The supplied software is easy to use and achieving good results requires no technical knowledge of the mindbending geek-fest that is colour management.

Various colours and shades are displayed on the screen, while the Eye-One Display 2 measures the results.

In this way, Windows can be sure of exactly what colour is actually displayed on your particular monitor when a certain colour is requested by the system.

In standard mode, calibrating your system can be as simple as placing the device on your monitor, selecting either LCD, CRT or laptop mode and accepting the defaults.

Advanced mode lets you select your own white point, gamma and brightness.

You can also measure the white point of the light in your room and use that, or a previously saved ICC (International Colour Consortium) profile, as a target to match your monitor's output to any characteristics you desire.

If you do want to delve a bit deeper, you can't; the supplied documentation extends only to a small getting started guide - this omits some of the more interesting fine-tuning options.

For example, advanced configuration controls allow you to select from two different types of ICC profile, but nowhere is the difference explained.

Once your profile has been created, Windows loads it up at boot time and professional image-editing packages such as Adobe Photoshop will automatically take advantage of the new profile, ensuring consistent results every time.

It's expensive but if you have a bunch of artistes beavering away to produce coordinated output, you'll need this. But then, your artistes will probably want to work on Macs anyhow. ?

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