PANTONE® huey™: Monitor Calibration Tool for Consumers & Budget-Minded Prosumers Leaves Lots of Questions

reviewed by Mike Swope

PANTONE & GretagMacbeth  http://www.PANTONE.com/products/products.asp?idArea=2&idProduct=10 Released: January 2006 $89 USD Requirements: CRT or LCD Monitor. Macintosh: Mac OS X 10.3 or later; Windows: Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Target Audience: Macintosh and Windows users who desire more accurate color from their monitor(s), including amateur and professional graphic designers, digital photographers and other prosumers. Strengths: Priced right for users on a budget. Easy to install, setup and use. Makes monitor calibration a no-brainer, no more guessing. Multi-lingual installation instructions. Weaknesses: No instructions about how to use the huey-calibrated monitor or further information about color management.

The PANTONE huey monitor calibration system is perfect for consumers and budget-minded prosumers looking for better color calibrated monitors so they can better color-correct their scans and digital photographs. If you fall into this category and find yourself frustrated by off-color images, the new PANTONE huey monitor calibration tool will help you take the first step to better color in all your projects. Especially since it costs less than most professional royalty-free stock photographs.

The huey monitor calibration system is so easy to install, a grade-school student can install it. You simply open the box, clean your screen with supplied materials, plug the huey colorimeter into an available USB port, insert the CD, drag the huey icon to your Applications folder, launch the huey application, and follow the five onscreen steps. The entire process takes less than 10 minutes, just a minute or two if you've done it before. Once installed, the huey colorimeter continues to monitor your room's lighting and adjust your monitor accordingly, so that you are able to constantly see the details in your images on your monitor, details that you don't want to wash out.

The huey monitor calibration system isn't invisible, once you've installed it. The huey application icon is displayed in the menu bar at the top of your Macintosh screen, alongside other icons such as volume, Airport, displays, and battery (if you've enabled them to display in the menu bar). From the huey menu, users can re-calibrate their monitor at any time, disable compensation for room lighting, adjust for room lighting immediately, and access the simple huey preferences. The huey's preferences can also be accessed from the System Preferences panel.

The huey preferences are very simple. Users can turn on/off room light monitoring and specify how often the room lighting should be sampled (default is every 10 minutes). Users can also turn on/off huey's color corrected profile, and elect how they will be using their computer from a list, to which huey makes minor display adjustments. There are settings for gaming, web browsing and photo editing, graphic design and video editing, and others settings for warm and cool display. To be honest, I don't know why anyone would choose to use the settings for warm or cool display, except personal preference. It would seem that to choose the warm or cool settings defeats the purpose of color calibrating the monitor.

If you've ever seen a true color-calibrated monitor, it isn't what you're used to using. The same will be true once you've color calibrated your monitor with huey. It will display colors differently than you've become accustomed over a long period of time. Your display, in fact, will appear grayer than usual, but you need to resist the urge to disable the huey profile. Instead, you'll need to give it a try for several days to get used to the new calibrated profile. After that, the uncorrected profile seems unnaturally bright and with high contrasts.

Though the PANTONE huey is inexpensive and easy to install and use, it is only the first step in a useful color managed workflow. No booklet or information about the basics of a color-managed workflow is packaged with the PANTONE huey. When huey has been installed and the monitor calibrated, what should be done next? How should users color correct their photos? With what software? Can they use their current software to correct their photos? Do they need Photoshop? If they're sending photos to be printed, what do they do?

Unfortunately, huey purchasers must turn elsewhere for answers to these questions, which involve a better understanding about how a color calibrated monitor fits into a color management system, especially if they're using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator with color profiles and sending projects to be printed. About the only option to find these answers is to search for them on Google or buy a book.

Find out more about Mike Swope: http://www.maccompanion.com/info/aboutus.html#mikeswope