For artists, photographers and animators it’s often essential to be working with an accurately color calibrated screen. It’s also important to be able to print accurate colors being sure the hard copy matches what is shown on the display.

The OpenHardware ColorHug Colorimeter device provided an inexpensive way to calibrate some types of screen, and is now being used by over 2000 people. Due to limitations because of the low cost hardware, it does not work well on high-gamut or LED screen technologies which are now becoming more common.

ColorHug Spectro is a new device designed as an upgrade to the original ColorHug. This new device features a mini-spectroraph with UV switched illuminants. This means it can also take spot measurements of paper or ink which allows us to profile printers and ensure we have a complete story for color management on Linux.

I’m asking anyone perhaps interested in buying a device in about 9 months time to visit this page which details all the specifications so far. If you want to pre-order, just send us an email and we’ll add you to the list. If there isn’t at least 100 people interested, the project just isn’t economically viable for us as there are significant NRE costs for all the optics.

Please spread the word to anyone that might be interested. I’ve submitted a talk to LGM to talk about this too, which hopefully will be accepted.

Published by

hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

6 thoughts on “”

  1. i had purchased a colorhug late last year. i haven’t calibrated my monitors yet, but they are all LED. will the colorhug i purchased not be effective and should i consider this new one to replace it?

  2. If you don’t get enough pre-orders, it might be worthwhile to do a Kickstarter to pick up the rest of the cost. I’m not going to spend £300 on this thing, but I’d gladly contribute 50 USD to make it happen (even knowing I will personally get nothing in return).

  3. The Phoronix story made me aware of ColorHug, very nice, just purchased one. I’ve been interested in color accuracy of screens for some time now, mainly because I’m anal about correctness just like how I like my speakers to be linear, and have a few questions:

    Can I use ColorHug to calibrate my screen to somewhere near sRGB by modifying the RGB-sliders in my monitor’s OSD and having CH check the result? I don’t know how the ICC stuff works, but I have the impression that using an ICC profile to correct the screen output before dispatching it to the monitor decreases the amount of discrete colors that can be displayed because you have to swap color values for other values, leading to banding and/or decreased gamut. Am I wrong?

    > it does not work well on high-gamut or LED screen
    By “LED screen” do you mean those with separate RGB-LEDs or that generally use LEDs as a backlight? I was under the impression that most Laptop backlights are LEDs.

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