I’ve started doing quite a bit more with Photography and Photo Editing these days and decided it made sense to purchase a device to color correct my screen, providing me true Pantone calibration for color control.
I purchased Pantone’s Huey, a USB device with a color sensor that looks at your monitor and makes the necessary adjustments to the color space and gamma in order to render true colors. In theory, any two screens that have been calibrated will have images that look the same, and any content that is professionally printed will look exactly like it did on screen.
NOTE: IF YOU HAVE A DUAL-MONITOR SYSTEM, THE HUEY IS NOT FOR YOU. I GOT BURNED BY THIS.
In virtually every way, the Huey is an exceptional device. It supports OS X with a Universal Binary, it supports XP, it’s installation and use is trivial, it can even monitor the lighting in the room in real time and make adjustments to your display dynamically.
Rather than re-hash the capabilities, Keith Cooper did an excellent write-up of the Huey.
Where the Huey falls short is that it’s software seems incapable of addressing a secondary screen. Most high end graphic artists have video cards that provide dual monitors. And the most painful thing to see happen is the dragging of an image from one monitor to the other and seeing the whole color space be different. Dual monitors are supposed to be an extension of the workspace.
The Huey only calibrates the primary monitor. Sure, you can do multiple machines, each with it’s own primary monitor, but if your desktop looks like the scene from the matrix, you’re out of luck, even though both OS X and XP allow independent screen profiles.
If you are determined, persistent, and lucky, it is possible to save a calibration setting, swap which monitor is the logical primary, calibrate, save, and switch back, then manually load those profiles. However, this isn’t always workable as the screen calibration drifts, not to mention it’s affected by the ambient light as well… hence the reason the Huey has a room light sensor.
Given that this is a software issue, not a hardware one, combined that most graphic cards these days support dual monitors, I think the oversight (please tell me it’s not deliberate) is an atrocious one.
Despite that, if you’ve got a single monitor system, or you do all your graphical editing on a single display, the Huey is a wonderfully quick device that does its job well and is highly portable. Professionals will want better, but the professional consumer (prosumer?) will find the Huey enjoyable and non-intrusive to work with.
The only other downside is to get software updates, you have to register online.
Walt gives the Huey color calibration device from Pantone a thumbs up, but hopes they add dual monitor support.
I wish I had read this before I purchased Huey. I am really shocked and upset that there wouldn’t be secondary, or really, infinite non-primary monitor support on the same machine. Don’t most graphic professionals use more than one monitor on the same machine??
For what it’s worth, Pantone now has a Huey Pro, and if you’re already an owner of Huey, you can get the Huey Pro Upgrade.
From what I can tell, the difference appears to be software.