The ColorMunki from X-rite is coming up in a number of threads. Apparently the hardware is a photospectrometer. For $400, that's a new precedent for a photospectrometer based system.
However, I just noticed something fishy in reading the description: apparently you print out an "interim" chart and scan it with the ColorMunki, then print out another chart and scan it in with a scanner? WTF? Is this description wrong? Using an uncalibrated flatbed scanner in printer profiling is a joke. I had a colorimeter package with some software that made color profiles for printers using a scanner, and it was totally mickey mouse. It did indeed generate ICC files, but they were a total waste of bits, and had nothing to do with getting a calibration profile for printers.
I also notice that all the descriptions of the ColorMunki Photo package say it can be used to calibrate projectors, but no mention of calibrating scanners, which is likely a lot more important to most photographers.
Anyone owning one of these willing to weigh in and provide some more details?
I own a Color Munki and have great results using the icc profiles it created. It does not require that you use an uncalibrated flatbed scanner, nor a flatbed scanner at all. You calibrate your monitor, then create a paper specific profile for your printer by printing out color squares that it knows the color values for. You then scan those with the color munki which tells the software how your printer paper combination treats their known colors/values. It then adjusts and has you print out a second set of color squares and you again scan that using the color munki. This fine tunes an adequate number of colors and values squares to give me an effective profile. Hope that helped.
I've calibrated a number of flatbed scanners, and never used a spectrophotometer to do it. What you need is something like a Kodak Q60 target, which is a photograph with a number of color patches on it. Along with the target is a reference file which contains the colorimetric values for all of the color patches in the target. The profile generation software knows what the colorimetric values are for each patch (from the reference file), and it reads the scanner RGB values from the image file (created when the target was scanned). Having the RGB values and the colorimetric values, that's all that's needed to build a scanner profile.
The colormunki is used to read the printouts, not your scanner, as others have mentioned.
However, the more interative scans you do, the more inaccurate the results are according to a few reviews I've read...
