Huey or Huey Pro?

[kman79]

I recently started getting into Editing Pictures more often. I'm a new Uncle and my sister has been taking plenty of pictures and she's leaving it to me to adjust for clarity and clean up noise and other image manipulation. Anyways, I adjusted colors on a few pictures just to see how they turn out in print. Well, both my MBP Display as well as my Dell 2407 do not represent the the color of the printed image accurately.

I'm wondering which of the two Huey products I should purchase. I'd rather not spend more money that I need to, and I'm wondering if the Basic Huey is sufficient fo rmy needs or do I need to purchase the Pro model to calibrate my screen to show images as close to what they would be in print?

Any help and opinions in this subject is greatly appreciated.

 

[kis]

I use a Huey (non-pro) at home and a Spyder at work. Generally speaking, both devices yield good resulsts . The Spyder is a lot slower and doesn't offer ambient light measuring - also, AFAIK there's still no Universal Binary software for the Spyder (there is for the Huey).
However, the Spyder tends to be a tad more consistent. Also, most literature on digital darkrooms will tell you how to calibrate with a Spyder - the Huey is less known. Also, the Huey doesn't seem to work on glossy screens - it most definitely doesn't work on the new iMac.

I'd say: if you can afford it, go with a Spyder - since the introduction of the Huey, prices for the Spyder have come down. If you can get the Huey for a lot less, go for that one. I wouldn't buy the Pro Version, though. The latter offers contrast and brightness settings - but I never fiddled with that.

 

[Digital Skunk]

Do you have anyway to check the numbers of your blacks, whites, and grays? If you have Aperture then you don't need any colorimeter or new display. Have you tried matching a color profile from your printer with your monitor? There are other more effective ways to get good color from your prints than spending more money on things that haven't really proven their effectiveness.

Use the numbers since they don't lie. Your huey will have to be used every few weeks or so and it still won't be as accurate. Go online you can find all the numbers you need for absolute white, black, red, blue, green, and middle/dark/light gray. After that there is nothing else you need.

 

[volvoben]

I calibrated my monitors long ago ‘by hand’, and though it was an improvement over uncalibrated, it’s not nearly as accurate nor as easy as my spyder.

I got the cheapest model (spyder2express) for around $65 if I remember correctly. To use multiple monitors you have to do a bit of a workaround (supposedly you need to buy the more expensive version to use multiple monitors but this isn’t true). I’ve found my prints (from adoramapix usually) match quite well, and their ilford B&W paper is much more accurate now (colors are also very close, but I didn’t expect the nice change in B&W). I calibrate about once a month on my monitors (LCD) and I’ve never noticed that they had wandered much (except the time I didn’t let an lcd warm up, the backlight really does need an hour to warm up, especially on my dell 2005fpw).

I say calibrate by hand, then if the results don’t suit you, go for the cheaper huey or the spyder2express.

and this probably doesn't need to be mentioned, but be sure your print source/printer is also well calibrated. prints from inkjets and drug stores often end up quite a bit off from original.