Pantone huey MEU101 by Pantone
|
List Price: Our Price: $74.99 You Save: $14.01 (16%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more digital camera details and other models |
|---|
Digital camera reviews of Pantone huey MEU101
Digital camera Review: Easy Color Correction
Summary: 5 Stars
The Huey is easy to install and use. Insert the accompanying software, plug in the USB cord, and the Huey does the rest. In 5 minutes, both monitors were calibrated perfectly to ambient lighting conditions. Can't get any easier than that.Digital camera Review: Easy and Accurate
Summary: 5 Stars
I just calibrated the LCD on my Inspiron laptop. The Huey was very easy to install and use. As the previous reviewer reports, I was not required to set brightness or contrast, or really anything at all. It's an almost completely automated process, and quick, too.
Two WARNINGS:
1) My monitor was previously WAY out of adjustment, as I discovered when I ran the Huey. I was shocked and a little horrified, at first, when I saw the results of the calibration. However, I compared some large scale photographic prints with the original digital images on my monitor. The monitor was a spot on match, just as I had desired! Now, several hours later, my eyes and mind have adjusted, and the monitor looks "normal," but it was a big shock, at first, so be prepared. Don't be surprised if your first reaction is that Huey "ruined your monitor." It probably didn't, it's just your eyes and your mind being so accustomed to the old settings, they have a hard time believing the new settings could be correct.
By the way, the photo prints I compared were made by a local high-end photo lab and were printed with a very high-end printer, a Lightjet 430. The folks at the lab tell me they recalibrate the printer every week, so I believe it is a good standard for color and tonal integrity.
2) My Inspiron laptop has a not-so-high-quality monitor (more designed for business, e-mail, etc. then for photo editing). The picture changes a large amount with the viewing angle. I need to tilt the monitor backwards just a bit to make the monitor match the printed photos. Folks with better monitors may not experience this, but my monitor shows this effect in a big way. Changing the monitor angle even a small amount makes a big difference in the apparent picture.
So, remember to be patient and let yourself adjust to the change, in case you first feel surprised or upset by the results and pay close attention to the angle of your monitor.
One last note, the Huey will automatically adjust to room lighting. I mostly like this feature. However, when I turn on my desk lamp, which sits very near to my laptop, the Huey makes more of an adjustment than I like. So, I do the following.
I turn off my desk lamp and then click on "Adjust for room light now," and Huey adjusts for the general room light (minus the desk lamp). Then I set Huey to wait four hours (the maximum time) before readjusting again for room lighting. I turn my desk lamp back on, and I'm happy. Huey won't readjust anything for another four hours, but I can manually tell it to take a new reading anytime I please.
All it took was a little bit of patience to get used to it and a small amount of experimenting to get it setup exactly the way I like. The Huey does its job very well.
Digital camera Review: Easy and works, but basic
Summary: 4 Stars
Pretty basic unit and a good starting point for color management. This is more for a home user than a professional as there are minimal settings. Just install the software (download latest update if you run vista), plug the huey into your USB, reboot, start the software, follow the directions, and thats it. There is one more step on tube monitors than flat panel, but it is still cake to use. I decided auto room light monitoring would be annoying so I turned that off. All in all very simple and seems to work well.
one thing to note - if you are used to a poorly calibrated monitor, the fixed one may seem too dark and and slightly color cast. But that is just relative to what you are used to, which is wrong. I see lots of negative posts about how it "turned my monitor pink", but that is likely because it was too yellow or blue before.
Bottom line: Cheap for calibration hardware, easy to use, and it works well enough for most amateurs. If you are into photography or graphic design, some color calibration is mandatory if you ever print or share your work.
Digital camera Review: Easy setup, too bad the results sucked
Summary: 1 Stars
Easy enough setup, easy enough to start the calibration, pretty to watch the colors flash on the screen, but the results had a horrible color cast. Checking the Pantone site showed it was a known issue, great. I sent in an incident as they requested, wound up calling in as well. I returned it for another, same problem. Turns out there was a batch of them bad, they knew about it and were waiting on replacements to go out to all us suckers who bought one.
Great business model, product is defective, but rather than recall them and lose sales, sell the broken product and force a user investment in time hoping they'll just wait it out.
Returned it and bought a Spyder3. Bought the Huey late May, was told July 1st a replacement would be on it's way, got an e-mail on the 3rd it would be the 21st at least. So sorry.
Digital camera Review: Easy to Install and It's Accurate
Summary: 5 Stars
I was a little concerned about buying the huey Monitor Color Calibrator after reading some of the reviews published previously on Amazon. It turns out there was no need to worry. This product installs and works as easily and accurately as advertised. I finally have the five monitors that I use regularly all displaying color exactly the same - and it took less than 10 minutes each including loading the software.
All of the monitors are LCD's and all of the computers use either XP Home or Professional. The steps to calibrate are simple: 1) clean the screen with provided kit 2) install the software 3) plug in the monitor into USB connector 4) run the software and follow the easy directions. The software did all of the adjustments. There was no direction to adjust contrast or any other control on the monitor. Really easy.