Testimonials

Video Testimonials

Bruce Dorn		Catherine Hall

What are people saying about Datacolor's color management and color calibration solutions?

"the Spyder is absolutely brilliant"

"since we purchased your products, we have increased our workflow by 100%"

These are just a few of the comments we've been receiving. See what other users, people just like you, are saying about Datacolor's color calibration solutions:

Before I began using Spyder3Pro, I was ready to stop using my digital SLR - and I was ready to give up on photo editing, as it had become a waste of time. It seemed there was such a digital mismatch between how I knew a photo should look, color-wise, and how it actually appeared in hard copy. Now with the ability to calibrate the color accuracy of my digital files, my photography is processed correctly. The colors I see on my monitor match the colors I see in my prints and enlargements.

Helpful hint: When using Spyder3Pro, it's important to complete the monthly calibration to ensure consistently good color accuracy.

In summary, I consider Spyder3Pro a 'must have' tool for any photographer who wants his digital files and photos to pop with the same colors that he saw when he pressed the shutter on his camera.

Creating custom profiles with Spyder3Print gave me some of the best prints I ever got out of my printer. After using the complete Spyder3 system I am totally hooked on the product. Plus the customer support was great; they actually cared how my prints came out and that is a huge thing to offer.

What I love about the Spyder3 is that it's from an established company I trust, I can attach it to my studio computer or laptop and it saves me time because it’s easy to use and accurate. When you're a photographer who travels a lot, like myself, knowing the colors you’re working with are really the colors in the print is invaluable because a professional photographer is a lot like a painter. Color is crucial to our work.

I have recently adopted Spyder3Studio, and find it invaluable. I require complete control within my own workflow; and the one area where I did not have that control was profiling. With the Spyder3 products a fully color managed workflow has been achieved. Starting off with a calibrated monitor using Spyder3Elite, then using Spyder3Print to profile my papers and inksets, I can produce prints that totally satisfy.

I go directly to the expert mode, and appreciate the various inputs that allow the user to generate different profile mixes from the same target measurements. My prints now hold the subtle separations in the files and keep the shadow areas true, all being accurately represented when soft-proofing in Photoshop. Some of my abstract work is difficult to print, heavy on soft tonal transitions and areas of subtle hue shifts. They have rarely worked well with any profile I had previously tried. I use a variety of non OEM paper, and now profile them all using this little gem.

I have installed and calibrated a number of monitors with the new Spyder3Elite, including a couple of projectors. It has been on both Windows and Mac machines, including OS X 10.5. After a slight issue with the software not seeing one of my monitors, everything is working perfectly.

There are two things that really suprised me. The first was the profiling of a projector, which in the past I would have done with a much higher cost solution. Results were excellent with Spyder3. I then tried to profile the LCD projector against a blue-gray wall rather than a screen, I was amazed at the quality of the profile on this background. The other thing that impressed me was when running Spyder3Elite against my professional graphics display and its bundled calibrator; the results were almost identical.

This is what I would call absolutely remarkable quality from a device that retails for less than 300 dollars. As I said before, this will be what I will be recommending!

I am now a believer. I just got back from a trip to Tokyo where I shot a several hundred photos in and around Shinjuku and Shibuya and using Adobe Lightroom edited them in color or B&W, based on my perception on how I thought each image worked. (initial edits, done on a color corrected laptop, are posted at http://www.pbase.com/troutco/tokyojuly2007).

You'll see the B&W photos are each tinted, to my taste, based on how I felt the image worked (some have a warm tone, some a colder tone, some a neutral tone). Some of the photos are color with specific colors intentionally desaturated. So far, printing out proofs at home tonight, using an Epson R2400, on Costco $18.95 semi-glossy, using my PrintFIX PRO 2.0 extended color/B&W profile for the paper, (without any tweaking of the profile) they look very good. My cursory reviews of them in less than ideal lighting is very impressive. I don't see any color casts, The toned colors look close enough to those on my desktop's color profiled CRT and LCD to win a horseshoe contest.

I've always found printing to be a very iterative, time consuming and often not very rewarding process (probably one reason I do so little of it) and have never been pleased with the screen matching of the images and their printed form. Looking at these test prints, toned B&W and color, and proofing using the extended PFP2 profile, these are the closest matches I've ever seen between my output and my edits on screen.

There is a great deal of creative freedom being able to shoot, edit and render, and then print, all from Lightroom, without having to make a complicated science project out of process of generating B&W images. This was also my first serious use of Lightroom instead of the combination of Capture One Pro and Photoshop. The workflow was much more rapid, and flexible than I've had in the past and I could easily iterate edits in color, B&W, or both. Now that I'm back home, I can readily take any images that need more advanced sharpening, exposure or tonal adjustment or masking into Photoshop.

It's been more than a dozen years since I've encountered an organization that is as dedicated to customer service as Colorvision|Datacolor is. To find in 2006 a long-established company whose top technical wizards make themselves available even on a Friday afternoon to help a customer solve a particularly thorny problem is astonishing. And then, to receive the next day (Saturday, no less) an emergency delivery of a new spectro -- well, I'm impressed."

"You folks are world-class."

I just wanted to take the time to thank you for the monitor Spyder and software. I own a digital photography studio and we use Fuji S1 and S2 pro cameras with Macintosh computers and 3 different Epson printers (Epson 10000, Photo 2000 and Stylus 1270). Our color workflow is perfect, everything matches from one monitor to the other and prints match from one printer to the other and customers are very impressed.

One of our competitors stopped by to get some drum scans done, and could not believe that our prints match our monitors so accurately! He asked how we do that. We told him that it took lots of color calibration, technicians and profile configuration, blah, blah, blah-blah, which made it sound very complicated when, in fact, all we did is use your products. He nodded as if he understood and left with a puzzled look on his face, full of envy and intrigue.

I'd say that since we purchased your products, we have increased our workflow by 100%, saving long hours of color correction, printing tests and guessing how the color would come out. We used to waste rolls and rolls of expensive Epson photo paper as well as ink, which is not cheap.

Thank you for making our lives easier and making work fun again!

ColorVision has once again raised the bar on achieving the ultimate goal of consistent color from start to finish with the introduction of the new PrintFIX profiling device. Designed to make the job of creating accurate ICC profiles for printers it simplifies the process and makes profiling available to the masses without the need for large capital investments in time and energy. In conjunction with the Spyder, this system will enable a complete color management system from beginning to end.

Our observations: The PrintFIX is fairly easy to use straight out of the box, though it is necessary to read the instructions well. All of the profiles created were very accurate and little adjustment was necessary. All in all we like the device and think it is the perfect solution for most of us who need good quick consistent color. It worked great with every printer/paper/ink combination that we tried. We've been using the Spyder in house to profile our monitors for quite some time and the pair of accessories has made our color management life a success!

Thanks for all your help. The FAQ's were a great help! Oh and by the way, I am an instructor for Digital Printing classes and I normally use Spectrophotometers for building profiles but I was looking for a more economical alternative when I read about PrintFIX and thought I'd give it a try.

Once I managed to get over my own system problems and get the PrintFIX to work, I have to say I'm impressed! I'll recommend it to all my participants (about 45 people per month) as they are looking for ways to improve their home ink-jet printing experiences. Thanks for all your help!

"...Anyhow, I calibrated my monitor, got my PrintFix chart into PS (eventually) and built a profile, printed a test image and WOW, I was 'gobsmacked!' It had a slight green cast which I fixed over the next couple of prints with DoctorPRO and I now have a spot on print profile. I'm impressed. I had used reams of Epson paper over the past 12 months to try and get a decent print match, I had resorted to printing only in classic mode in PS because it was the only way to get decent print results..."

Read more reviews on Monitor Calibration, Printer Calibration, and ColorVision Suites.