Gretagmacbeth Huey
Gretag, THE color specialist enters the economical calibration market with a strange device. This is a small stick that you have to put on your monitor, which is also capable of measuring ambient light and automatically adjusting colors when it changes. It sounds interesting!
First step, you have to put the tool in the support provided in order to measure ambient light. After that you have to clean your monitor with the small piece of tissue provided, select the type of monitor you want to calibrate (LCD, notebook, CRT) and start the procedure. Once more we don´t have to adjust the brightness, contrast, gamma or RVB channels via the OSD. The Huey probe says that it handles everything.
The procedure is very quick; one minute (to be compared to the 7 of the ColorVision). A few color patches are displayed, several gray shades and it’s over. It is even a little scary… is that it? We don´t need a long and laborious procedure, the LaCie is also fast, but basic colors used for calibration are not numerous.
Last step, the software invites us to choose between the 9 available profiles. In fact only two are interesting, "web surfing" and "graphic design". The others seem far fetched and uninteresting. And to the honest the 2 "correct" don´t seem to be really exciting…
The last part, the software asks us to put the probe back in the support. It will now measure ambient lighting permanently and automatically adjust colors.
The test image before and after calibrationLast step, we check the calibration efficiency with our LaCie tool that unfortunately confirms what we already foresee:
The Huey has adjusted the primary colors but not the rest. The whole picture isn´t better than in the beginning, the average DeltaE is strictly the same as before calibration. The two correct profiles were tested with the same result. We processed the calibration several times and the results are amazingly stable. That isn´t bad at all.
