hueyPRO

Pantone’s huey was the first screen calibration product to make colour management accessible to the masses, a plug-and-play solution pitched at everyone from hobbyist photographers to web designers. Although hueyPRO (£30 more) will appeal to a higher-end audience, it remains an accessible and elegant solution.

Like the huey, the hueyPRO is designed to profile LCD, CRT and laptop displays. It is a pen-like colorimeter that adheres to the screen by suckers and can calibrate your monitor within three minutes. It can also measure ambient light levels in all light conditions. Although, hueyPRO gives control over brightness and contrast for LCDs and laptops as well as CRTs, if you have an iMac it’s not possible to adjust contrast using the Enhance Contrast setting. However, the iMac’s default contrast setting is acceptable.

Other enhancements include menu choices for the selection of gamma and white-point settings, support for multiple monitors and an enhanced Help menu, which offers workflow suggestions on better colour output.

One quibble is that pushing anything onto an LCD screen can potentially damage it, and the huey does need to be pressed firmly for its rows of squid-like suckers to adhere. Licking the suckers means you can press more gently, but this is messy. A counterweight solution would have been better.