Hands-On with the XRite ColorMunki: Great Hardware, Terrible Software
Posted in: Displays, Today's Chili
This particular Colormunki has been lying around my various offices for
a long time now, — perhaps more than a year — waiting to be reviewed.
The reason is not laziness, but buggy software. You see, while the
Munki itself is an easy to use color-calibration device which both
looks good and works well, the software, on the Mac side at least, is
an abortion. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, let me tell
you what it’s supposed to do.
Color calibrating a monitor is important for professionals. The idea is that all your displays show the same colors, and that from this consistent base you can also add in color profiles for printers, meaning what you see on the screen matches what you see on the page.
Since computers entered the world of publishing, this was the case. Now though, the digital camera boom means that many amateurs also want color accuracy. I don’t print much, for instance, but I do want my MacBook and my external monitor to match. For that, I need calibration.
The ColorMunki Photo kit contains the unit, a bag with a weighted strap (you put the Munki in the bag and hang it in front of the screen) a USB cable and the software. There are several things that the hardware can do: automatically calibrate and generate color profiles for you monitor, scan prints to make printer profiles and even check the light color and levels in the room. I tested the monitor calibration.
It’s simple to use, and the software guides you through the setup — you set the contrast of the screen to the max, if you like you can put the box on the desk next to the monitor to measure the ambient light first, then you hang the ColorMunki (actually a spectrophotometer) over the front of the screen. After giving instructions on setting brightness and contrast, various colors flash on screen. After a minute or two, you’re done, and the profile is stored and put into use. On a Mac you can see this in the Displays preference pane.
I used the machine on both my MacBook’s screen and my Samsung monitor. Before, the colors were way off — the same photo looked completely different on each screen. Now, they almost match. The MacBook has a slightly yellower rendering of whites and light grays but for me, it’s more than accurate enough.
So what’s the problem? That software. I understand that, in order to directly set the color profiles, ColorMunki needs to access some low-level processes. But the software runs all the time. Even when you’re not using it, there are two processes running in the backgound, one of which cannot be stopped. Not even a force quit command from OS X Activity Monitor, nor a Killall command from the Unix terminal will end it.
This wouldn’t be so bad, but the process is constantly “not responding”. Here’s a picture. Note the use of almost a gig of virtual memory.
There is no way to make this go away short of uninstalling the application. At least, this was the case a year ago. I recently moved to a new apartment and dug out the ColorMunki to check it out again. There is new software. Did it fix things? No. The hung process persists.
I figured that maybe I could install the software, use it and then uninstall it. This is a review, so it’s not a big deal for me, but in a pro-environment, where you might calibrate your monitors weekly, it would be impossible. Worse, there is no uninstaller for the Mac. There is a download page hidden away on the X-Rite website, but the link doesn’t lead to a file. UPDATE: After searching for the link to post here, I found a different page which does have the uninstaller.
Wait, it gets even worse. The installer puts files all over the place. Applications should be in the applications folder. ColorMunki puts them in both the Application Support folder (a big no-no) and also inside the Library folder — the root one, not the user one. What’s more, there is a lot of stuff you don’t need, such as a picture sharing application and the rather mysterious Color Munki Photo Try, which launches at startup and has no options or menu items.
This is a shame. The software, while not particularly Mac-like in appearance, works fine. It’s easy to use and the results are good. The hardware, too, is solid and feels built to last. But the runaway processes and litter installed on my machine mean that I have uninstalled everything.
In short, if I had to use this on a regular basis, I would actually keep another disk with a bootable OS X system on there, just for running the calibration. As a recommendations that is, of course, no recommendation at all. If there are any PC users who have a different experience, let us know in the comments. $500.
Product page [ColorMunki]
For $200 you’d expect to get from Point A to Point B–and that’s about it. TomTom’s 
