Pantone ColorMunki Design

Other products by Pantone

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 12 x 8.2 x 3.2 inches ; 3 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B001715D0I
• Item model number: MEU115
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,839 in Electronics (See Bestsellers in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 16, 2008

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Meet ColorMunki Design. The innovative new way to create your own world of color.

ColorMunki, the integrated solution that gives you the freedom to design with any color from the visible spectrum. Even ones you never thought possible. Now you can swing from inspiration to production without losing color quality. And ColorMunki is so versatile, it is ready to help you grab color for your next idea.

Capture: ColorMunki See, ColorMunki Use Go beyond RGB and CMYK to capture almost any color you see with the all new ColorMunki hardware designed specifically for reading colors: on your screen, your desk, your co-workers breakfast, the family pet... anywhere you find inspiration.

Dummy-Proof Software:
Rediscover your love for color with the ColorMunki software’s jaw-dropping visuals and easy-to-use workflow. With the ability to search, tag, store and manage color palettes, you will be running to work in the morning to play with your ColorMunki.

Create and Celebrate Build color palettes automatically from your own digital images, Pantone Libraries or readings that you take from whatever inspires you.

Calibrate: Tune Up Your Monitor and Printer ColorMunki is the first affordable, all-in- one device for your color needs. Quickly and easily calibrate your monitor, printer and projector all with the same device. Just set the ColorMunki to the appropriate setting to tune your color without the need for additional pieces or accessories.

Will It Print?
Check the colors you want to use before the printer does with the all-new Print Safe feature. Print Safe shows you what colors are achievable in virtually any printing situation on, any paper.

Pull colors from any images to use in your design. ColorMunki allows you to extract the most predominant colors from; our stock image library, your photo libraries or any image you drag onto the application.

Communicate. Speak the Same Language Everyone in your team, from designer to printer, will speak the same color language using the ColorMunki AppSet. ColorMunki software automatically sets your design applications to operate in a properly color controlled environment.

Feeding Frenzy
Connect with fresh feeds from colormunki.com to access and share inspirational images and celebrity palettes.

Sync With Ease
Automatically synchronize the color palettes you create in ColorMunki software with your favorite Adobe and Quark applications, as well as colormunki.com, with built-in upload ability.

Comparison of Features

Product Description
Your new best friend for professional color palette creation and color control. ColorMunki Design is a color creation and inspiration solution with robust color selection, verification, specification and sharing functionality. Select colors from Pantone® PMS and GoeTM libraries, image libraries or capture spot colors from just about any surface, plus preview out-of-gamut by paper type. Includes essential color control functions for calibrating displays, projectors and printers with spot color optimization with a fully integrated all-in-one device. Designed with powerful features and an easy-to-use, intuitive interface, youll soon be calling ColorMunki Design your new best friend. Ideal for agencies, corporate in-house and freelance designers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Works great (so far) with some tweeking and guessing, October 6, 2008

By	J. A. macTavish - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was a bit anxious when I received my Colormunki Design - I had read some mixed reviews, a few of which were from professional photographers using Colormunki Photo, and those particular reviews had tended to be critical. I have been working on an illustrated book, and ordered the Colormunki after I had exhausted my attempts to print anything resembling my work as it appeared on my iMac. My printer is a Canon ip4500 - not a printer that is even addressed by the professional quality paper companies whose paper I was using (Hahnemuhle and Inkpress), nor one that I thought the makers of Colormunki had in mind when they designed their product. But I was desperate, and hopeful that the Colormunki would at least get me closer to producing a decent print.

The Colormunki Design arrived, complete with a Pantone GeoGuide that I hadn't expected and was pretty delighted to receive. Installation went smoothly, and I was able to calibrate my monitor with no problem. Then I dove right in to create a printer profile for my Inkpress Luster Duo paper. That's where I began to have problems.

For one thing, it was unclear to me how I was meant to, and if I had, turned off Color Management in the printer dialog box that pops up when you attempt to print the sample swatches from the Colormunki program. I was further confused by the fact that when I print from an Adobe program, like Photoshop, I could clearly turn off Color Management. My attempts to produce a color profile that produced a print that bore any resemblance to my monitor image was very mixed - the colors I was producing on my printer were wonderfully vibrant where before they had always been muddy. I saw, on the paper, the colors I hoped to see in my prints - only they usually weren't occurring where I wanted them - and overall the prints were too dark and oversaturated.

To make a very long story short, after lots of profile attempts, and of expensive ink and paper piling up in the scrap heap, I called Colormunki support. Mary at the support center was very friendly and interested in helping me figure out what was happening w/ my profiles (even though I'm sure I and my ip4500 wasn't the worst of Pantone's worries regarding the Colormunki). We had a number of conversations regarding the Color Management problem, I sent her a few screen shots of the various printer dialog boxes, and she was over in her office setting up Canon printers and doing experiments on her own, with some input from the tech guys who were wandering around working on much larger problems, no doubt having to do with unhappy professional photographers working on professional printers.

Things were gradually working out (we figured out how to turn off Color Management) but the real breakthrough came when Mary mentioned, kind of offhand, that perhaps the Colormunki wasn't recognizing the paper profile I had chosen; I was using, having made a guess from the suggested paper profiles on the Inkpress site, Hagaki as my media choice. Using a leftover sheet of Epson (sorry Canon!) Double-sided Matte Photo paper, I made a profile choosing Matte Photo paper as my media choice - and viola! The prints I made with that profile, using the Inkpress paper, were almost dead on!

I went on the make another profile w/ the Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Duo paper, and that too looked splendid, with the exception of the reds, which weren't rich enough. I solved that by printing my reds twice. Fine by me, and ostensibly I could "refine" my profile to address that problem.

So, for me the Colormunki Design was worth it, and I am excited to explore the color palettes that come with the device and on the software. Yes, it would have been great if there had been clearer instructions both in the software prompts and on the website for addressing the Color Management issue, and I can almost weep when I look at the paper and ink ($23 a cartridge! 5 cartridges!) I wasted because of that oversite on Pantone's part. Also, the program should be able to handle whatever media type my printer driver can handle, so that one doesn't have to second guess the results.

Given, though, the relatively friendly price of the Colormunki, the very ernest and responsive support I received (thanks Mary!) and that it did do the job with my consumer class printer, I'm happy. Weeping over the color of your prints? Buy a Colormunki (and maybe some extra ink.)

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Poor software, doesn't work on three different computers, December 21, 2008

By	W. Nicholls (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I bought ColorMunki Design back in April. Installing the software takes forever since X-rite includes a long installation of Net Framework. And every incremental upgrade requires a bloated download including the Net Framework and the very slow installation. I'm a long time customer of Monaco (acquired by X-rite) and of X-rite using their excellent i1 2 display profile system with Eye-One Match software. I assumed ColorMunki would be as good as other highly regarded Xrite products but with more versatility. I was sadly wrong.

My first contact with X-rite support was regarding the registration process that wasn't working as it was supposed to. After getting the product registered, I was able to run display calibration with a decidedly pink cast. I was able to use the colorimeter to sample object colors and calibrate a digital projector via a notebook computer. But the profiles all had a pink cast. After updating my display card's driver, I found ColorMunki refused to complete a display profile. The process would hang, and I contacted Xrite support who provided personal service but without ever being very effective. They ended up providing a registry toggle that turned off my NEC display's hardware profiling feature. That eventually got display profiling to function, but still with a pink tint that was obviously bad for the target color temperature. The software for display profiling is poor. You can choose the basic "easy" mode with little control over the profiling parameters. If you choose advanced, the software insists on measuring ambient light to set your display's brightness. If you work where ambient lighting doesn't change during the day, that's a workable limitation. But if you don't, you had better profile the display during the brightest part of your day or you'll be working with a display that's too dim. Since the product was brand new to the market, I took a "wait and see perspective" and hoped that updates would fix profile accuracy an offer better user control.

I discovered that the display driver I had been using had a bug that interfered with my NEC display's hardware calibration and passed that information along to X-rite support. A new driver fixed that bug, and X-rite has an update to ColorMunki so I decided to give it another try for profiling. This time, I started to get erratic behavior from ColorMunki. Sometimes a profile would run normally, but still pink. But other times the device wouldn't be recognized, or the process would hang. I tried different USB ports, and cables and eventually was sent a replacement colorimeter by X-rite support.

I had given up on using ColorMunki for display calibration by that time. I had my i1 colorimeter to fall back on so I decided to keep ColorMunki for color swatch sampling and perhaps eventually doing printer profiling for specialy paper. But I found that I couldn't get the ColorMunki software to recognize the ColorMunki device on either my workstation or my notebook computer. I contacted X-rite support and downloaded a couple of software updates.

As of today, I can't get the ColorMunki device to be recognized on three different computers. I'm trying to get a response from X-rite support, but they've become hard to find via the website (which now has an extensive troubleshooting section) and they don't return my emails. I've been not only patient but have done my best to help X-rite support with detailed descriptions and screen shots to help them sort out problems. My patience is gone and I not only want a refund or replacement with a different X-rite product, I also want to warn others that ColorMunki is an inferior product, that's ineffectively supported. I say that as a graphic designer with over a decade of display profiling experience using excellent tools from Monaco and X-rite.

The ColorMunki device itself is versatile, but very clumsy to use for display profiling. I find that it's very easy to accidentally press the large button area in the center hub as I try to rotate the device through its self-calibration position to it's display measurement position. The colorimeter comes with a neoprene case and weighted strap that are awkward to use as you dangle the device in front of the display.

If the software was as advanced as Eye-One Match and created accurate profiles, the clumsy design would be a fair tradeoff for versatility. For me, the device fails at its most basic job of providing accurate color profiling, and X-rite has failed to get this relatively expensive package working on any of my computers.

For display profiling, choose i1 Display 2 while it's available. If you run 90 series NEC displays, choose NEC's SpectraView II to unlock the full performance of your hardware, including hardware profiling. Avoid junk like X-rite's Huey (note all the reviews that describe pink profiles - I have to believe that the same incompetence is at work on Huey and ColorMunki). It pains me to see X-rite fall down so badly after serving the market well for so long.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Software on vista is crap, November 16, 2008

By	Gaelen Hudson (Honolulu, HI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I had high hopes for this product for all it's supposed to be able to do. The calibration portion and hardware works fine, however I can't get the Design software to function properly. The program installs initially and then won't open. I can see the process running but the app never opens. They recently released a new version of the Design sftware and that starts to open but all I get is the frame of the window and it never progresses beyond that. X-rite support has been worse then useless and unresponsive.