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.
You can purchase Quato monitors in the UK from our online partner, Native Digital.
Visit us at IPEX 2010
May 10, 2010
Come and visit us in Hall 11, stand F222 at IPEX from May 18th – 25th at the NEC, Birmingham.
We’ll be showing the latest versions of the ProofMaster and PrintFactory RIPs by FourPees, along with Quato monitors.
You can register your attendance at IPEX here.
ISO 9001 with ISO 12647
November 20, 2009
By Rob Griffith.
For a long time I’ve mentioned when training that colour management is a form of quality assurance. You don’t recalibrate to profile a device because you think it’s inaccurate. You test, re-calibrate and profile the device regularly so you know it’s not inaccurate. Colour management should not be used to fix problems but to prevent them. I recently was asked to join an ISO 9001 with 12647 auditors course and had the opportunity to learn a lot more about quality systems and came to realise how well colour management fits into them.
ISO 9001 is a long standing quality management system standard and the BPIF (British Printing Industries Federation) are formulating a new standard that links ISO9001 with ISO12647, the printing press standard, to allow companies to be certified by internationally recognised bodies as being able to print to ISO 12647 and have the supporting quality systems in place to ensure both conformity to the standard and customer satisfaction. Read more
Profiling Wide-Gamut Monitors
June 23, 2009
Now that many top-of-the range TFT monitors from Eizo and NEC achieve or exceed the Adobe RGB colour space, one of the questions we frequently get asked is whether the calibrators we sell are still up to the job?
Our own testing shows that both the Eye-One series (Eye-One Display LT, Eye-One Display 2 and Eye-One Pro) along with the Spyder3 (Spyder3PRO and Spyder3Elite) will work just fine, although there are some issues with the X-Rite DTP 94 (aka Monaco Optix XR).
The DTP94 was officially discontinued by X-Rite a few years ago, just after their merger with GretagMacbeth, however it has still been available as an OEM product from some sources, although X-Rite themselves have no longer been officially providing software upgrades (which has led to some issues with new operating systems such as Windows Vista).
Despite the fact that the DTP94 is still regarded by some as one of the best devices of it’s kind, it can struggle with TFT displays that exceed 100% Adobe RGB gamut, such as the latest version of the NEC SpectraView Reference 2690. There is a work-around or ‘fudge’ as it’s technically called – get in contact if you want to know more.
For more information on our testing results with calibrators, check out this article here.
For more information or to buy an Eye-One Display, click here. For Spyder3 information, click here.
Adobe DNG Profile Editor
February 20, 2009
If you are using Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW to convert you RAW files Adobe have developed a free (but not supported) tool to help you get better colour. Both Lightroom and ACR use prebuilt camera profiles created by Adobe. These generally give good results, often you have to do some tweaking of the RAW conversion to get what you want.
If you find that you are always doing the same tweaks to every shot then it could be a sign that the built in profile isn’t working very well for you. What DNG Profile Editor allows you to do is to tweak the built-in profiles to suit your own camera and preferences. It also allows you to build a new profile from a shot of a Macbeth Color Checker (converted to Adobe’s DNG format).
The new profile is then saved and is accessible in ACR or Lightroom. In my own quick test I shot the Macbeth under daylight on my D70, built a profile and then applied to a shot of my daughter I took a few months ago. The result was a definite improvement in colour saturation and accuracy versus the standard ACR 4.4 profile.
Downloading DNG Profile Editor and using a Macbeth Colorchecker could make a significant increase in the accuracy of your shots and also decrease the time it takes to process your RAW files.
To download the free (unsupported) application, go here:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles:Editor
For information or to buy a ColorChecker chart, go here:
http://www.nativedigital.co.uk/shop/product.php/44/macbeth-colour-checker-chart-v1
Calibrating the colour on your TV
February 1, 2009
Written by Rob Griffith
Doing what I do for a living can be a curse. I can’t flick through a magazine without looking at the quality of the repro and print, I can’t walk past an ad on the tube without peering closely at the dots. Needless to say local newspapers get recycled and not read due to the appalling quality of most of the images. It drives my wife nuts. Imagine my mutterings and chunterings when we had a new LCD TV delivered and the colour was a bit off. I was pausing DVDs and fiddling in the picture settings menus with the myriad of controls until I thought I had made an improvement. My wife put up with it for a day or so but my three year old son objected, loudly, to having Lightning McQueen’s adventures interrupted because his dad didn’t think he was quite the right hue of red. There was only one thing for it, the TV would have to be calibrated.
The Spyder3 TV uses the same colorimeter as the Spyder3 Elite or Pro systems but the big difference is that it comes with a DVD of test patterns that you play as you adjust the colours on the screen. You need a laptop close to the TV, of course. The software starts by asking you what type of TV you have (it will do them all, even projectors), and then what controls it has – Brightness, Contrast, Colour Temperature and Tint etc. You then have to show one of the test patterns, take a measurement with the colorimeter and then adjust the TV and measure again. There is a lot of juggling the remotes for your TV and DVD player and it took about 40 minutes but the improvement was considerable.
The only weakness is that my TV had more controls than the Spyder3 TV adjusted so I wasn’t sure what values to leave those that weren’t included at but opted to leave them at the defaults. The colour still wasn’t perfect but it was in the ball park and all I felt I needed to do was to adjust the red slightly to get the fleshtones a bit better.
I’d also like to know what standard I’m adjusting the TV to, presumably some TV industry standard. There is a professional level software from Datacolor called ColorFacts that is aimed at the broadcast industry and now I’ve dipped my toe into TV calibration I can see it as being a possible addition to our list of services.
Find out more about Spyder3TV and buy online here:
http://www.nativedigital.co.uk/shop/product.php/716/spyder3tv
Which Monitor Calibrator is best?
September 1, 2008
Written by Rob Griffith
August is usually a good month for me in that, because of holidays etc, I have less site visits for training or consultancy and so I can actually clear the back log of testing and research jobs I’ve been promising myself I’ll do all year. One such job is trying to come up with an answer to the above question, one I get asked very frequently. To get an answer I used my LaCie 324 monitor and the BlueEye Pro software that comes with it, and a Spyder3, a i1 Display 2 and an i1 Pro. I used the BlueEye software and not the Datacolor or X-Rite software in each case to make sure I was only testing the calibration hardware and not the very different approaches the different software takes to monitor calibration. Read more
Printing onto unusual media
July 10, 2008
Written by Rob Griffith
After nearly ten years in colour management there aren’t many things I haven’t profiled. Printing onto cermaics, fabrics, plastics, metals can all be profiled to give better results but of course they do cause more problems than conventional media.
This week I visited a company I have been to before that seem to delight in giving me something new to profile. I have previously colour managed their fabric printing with great success and this has meant they now call me in whenever they get a new system in. This time as well as re-profiling a dye sublimation fabric printing system as part of a regular maintenance agreement I was going to tackle their new leather printing system. Read more
Visit our stand at the DPI Show, London
June 18, 2008
The Colour Collective is exhibiting at the ‘Digital Photo & Imaging Show’ (DPI) at the Business Design Centre, London from June 26th – 27th.
Come along and see us on the ‘Native Digital’ stand and check out the latest Eizo monitors as well as X-Rite colour management equipment too.
DPI will provide pro-photographers and the whole photographic industry a knowledge-based event where they can see and try the currently creative, the productively profitable and the just plain useful and interesting-to-know solutions and services in digital imaging. Read more
Coins and Medals – colour management at work in museums
May 21, 2008
Written by Rob Griffith.
I always enjoy working with Museums, it is fascinating to look behind the scenes and see things the public never do. The maze of corridors lined with collections and rows of bookshelves with obscure leather bound volumes go on for miles.
The British Museum has been a regular customer since we did project colour managing their Photographic department a few years ago. Last week I visited the Coins & Medals department, not an obvious candidate for colour management perhaps but since I have been doing colour management for nearly ten years now I have learnt that all kinds of people see a need for colour accuracy.
The Coins & Medals team were using an Epson Expression 10000XL flatbed scanner to scan some of their collection of 80,000 bank notes and coins and had bought from us a copy of X-Rite’s ProfileMaker Scanner Module, a couple of IT8 targets and an X-Rite EyeOne Display 2 for monitor calibration. Read more
