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I'm considering the purchase of a colorimeter. My choices seem to be
Eye-One PM or Eye-One Photo. I'm looking for suggestions about how to decide
between these two packages based on the fact that I've also become convinced
that I must purchase a good set of commercial printer profiles.
If I purchase the profiles in any case, will I still need/can I make
good use of the additional capabilities provided by the much more expensive
Eye-One Photo, or will I be able to make do with the less expensive Eye-One
PM?
-Lew

>From: "Lew"

>I'm considering the purchase of a colorimeter. My choices seem to be
>Eye-One PM or Eye-One Photo. I'm looking for suggestions about how to decide
>between these two packages based on the fact that I've also become convinced
>that I must purchase a good set of commercial printer profiles.
>
> If I purchase the profiles in any case, will I still need/can I make
>good use of the additional capabilities provided by the much more expensive
>Eye-One Photo, or will I be able to make do with the less expensive Eye-One
>PM?

If you stick to the papers offered by the manufacturer then there's a good
chance you'll find plenty of adequate profiles for the papers. Once you start
using 3rd party papers you may find you'll need to make your own profiles
though since some guys provide them and some don't. I'm testing several fine
art papers for my Epson 4000 right now and companies like Arches (Infinity
Smooth paper), Hahnemuehle (Photo Rag) and Moab (Entrada) all have ICC profiles
you can download, but these are fairly expensive papers (except for Moab),
maybe $6/sheet for 17x22". The cheaper papers generally don't offer this kind
of support.

The other thing to consider is "which printer are you using"? The Epson Pro
models seem to have very good ICC profile support and also they are very
repeatable from machine to machine so a generic profile should be fine. The
Epson 2200 and 1280 aren't as repeatable so you'll find more variation between
what the profile tells you and what you actually get (I have both the 1280 and
2200 as well as the 4000). I've heard it's very difficult to accurately
profile the 1280 for example because it will shift after ink changes or even
after a clean cycle (per digital guru Bill Atkinson, who profiled the Epson
9600/7600 better than Epson could). Bill also said it was almost impossible to
correctly profile the Epson 2000 because of the metamerism issues.

There is less ICC support for the HP and Canon inkjets so if you get one of
them you might want to get the profile generation package.

Bill