Quato – Science & Simplicity

May 25, 2010

By Rob Griffith

I recently visited Quato in Germany as part of the process of The Colour Collective becoming a reseller of their monitors. We have been reselling colour critical displays from EIZO and NEC for many years and I’ve been involved previously with older marques such as Barco and PressView but still I was very impressed with Quato as a company and their products. It is rare in these days of mass manufacture to find a company producing small numbers of high quality products to very exacting standards.

Quato only produce a few thousand screens a year. They are produced in factory in Taiwan that is shared between Quato and several medical monitor manufacturers so the very high standard of quality assurance are used. When it arrives in Germany each screen is checked by hand. It is warmed up and calibrated and only passed for sale if it passes very stringent uniformity tests – much tighter than their competitors. If the screen drifts out of uniformity during its life it can go back to Germany for readjustment. Their dead pixel policy is very good as well. They guarantee no sub-pixel failures in the centre of the screen and no more than 2 or 3, depending on the model, over the rest of the screen.

Their iColor Display software that calibrates the software is packed full of useful features including the UGRA UDACT software for checking that the calibration and uniformity conforms to elements of ISO 12646 and the requirements of printing standards organizations such as FOGRA. It is also unusual in that it will calibrate not only Quato displays via the hardware connection but also other displays via software calibration, enabling both a main and palette monitor to be profiled by the same software for example. They bundle the X-Rite DTP94 with iColor Display because they have found it to be the most reliable device and X-Rite manufacture it specially for them. The companies active participation in many industry bodies such as FOGRA and the ICC is a measure of their commitment to colour science and quality.They also produce print profiling software that they claim is far more accurate than others. I’ll be testing that soon.

If you are looking for absolutely the best colour critical monitors on the market and need very high degrees of colour accuracy for soft-proofing or retouching then you should certainly consider a Quato. Such quality doesn’t come without a corresponding price tag though so these screens aren’t for everyone but as I said if you need to go that one step further in search of colour excellence then Quato could be the answer.