Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Walt Mucha" 
<wkm@k...> wrote:
>
> You might want to check out Colorvisions PrintFix Pro. I have beta 
tested it and it's pretty darn good and half the price of the 
packages you named. Very easy to use and it's easy to edit the 
profiles generated as needed. 
> http://www.colorvision.com
> 
> Regards. Walt


It's way less than half, he was asking about the top end products 
which are in the several thousand dollar range each, and that's 
without any hardware to measure the targets.

Now to the question... Do you need that level of software? Unless you 
are going to be building CMYK profiles or multi ink (6, 7, or 8 
colors), the answer may be no. That said, I own Monaco Profiler 
Platinum, and it works well. The Gretag PMP5 offers some features 
that other software does not (yet), namely the ability to use custom 
made profile targets with patch counts from 45 up to about 4096 RGB 
patches. It also offers several different perceptual 
rendering "flavors". Gretag recently broke PMP into several different 
packages depending on your needs, so it's price now starts at around 
$2500. Monaco Profiler starts at around $3000. And worth mentioning 
is also Heidelberg's Prinect Profile Toolbox (Printopen 5) at around 
$2000 directly from Heidelberg. I own Printopen 4 and it also works 
very well.It was a toss up between upgrading to the Prinect Profile 
Toolbox and Profiler, Printopen 5 has some nice new features, and 
there are some quality contol tools included with the rest of the 
toolbox that might be useful.

Now if you buy any of these software only tools, you will also need 
some hardware to go with them, look for bundles from Gretag and 
Xrite, Heidelberg does not have any hardware bundles. One of the best 
values is the Xrite Profiler/DTP70 bundle, if you look at the price 
of the DTP70, you'll seee the discount you are getting. I'm sure 
Gretag will have a new bundle with the i1/iO device soon.