ColorHug is an open source display colorimeter | Hacker News Reader

ColorHug is an open source display colorimeter

hughski.com

61 pointsadambyrtek11 comments

Soooo refreshing to see a competitive feature comparison chart where the company posting the feature match ups doesn't have ALL green check boxes (and the competitors are "missing" features, of course.)

I might be going completely off-the-wall here, but are the cameras in mobile phones reliable enough to be used as a sensor.

Obviously there would have to be a two-stage process:

1) Someone with your model of phone (iphone 4 say) figures out the properties of the camera and uploads a 'phone profile'.

2) You use that profile to calibrate your LCD screen.

I'm just curious, because I've never seen this idea done, or rejected outright. This might be because there is some really obvious reason to reject it that I am missing.

Probably not to achieve a level of accuracy better than just following an on screen calibration wizard. I say this having done studio photography where we used a GretagMacbeth Color Checker (http://www.rmimaging.com/information/colorchecker.html) to calibrate the camera back (PhaseOne P25+ on a Hasselblad H2) beforehand. The colors are already pretty accurate straight out of the camera but when you're trying to match specific colors between the print and real life objects, ever little bit counts. I wouldn't expect a mobile phone camera module to have nearly the same level of quality control as a medium format digital back either.

The other reason (and this is probably more realistic, since most people don't do the full end to end calibration) is that the mobile phone camera would pick up the ambient light as well as what you were trying to measure. Colorimeters sit right on the screen (on CRTs they used to suction cup on) to block out any ambient light.

Thank you, that saved me investigating if I should write such an app.

Of course, selling snake oil colour calibration to iPhone users might still make money ;)

Fantastic! Looks like desktop colour management is finally starting to happen for Linux. I don't really feel like I trust the low end commercial offerings anyway - at least this will be something that can be examined.

Where this could be very cool is for LCD / Plasma TV's. But that is another beast I guess

I don't see a BOM or anything; maybe that will be released later.

Linux only? Fail.

You pretty much didn't cover any of the market that need this (e.g. photoshop users, graphic designers, photographers).

Professional Photoshop users already have existing hardware. This is trying to fill the gap that none (afaik) of the existing hardware offerings support Linux.

Also, if you really care, they say they'll ship a Linux Live CD with the device. So you boot your Windows machine with the live CD, take the readings with the device, save the color profile to a file on USB, reboot to Windows & import the profile. The generated profile itself is cross-platform.

At least that's what they say :)

I have a spyder 3 that works in Linux via argyllcms.

The only reason it's Linux-only is because Richard is the developer of colord and the Gnome Colour Manager, so obviously writing Linux drivers is what his biggest priority is. It's open-source, so I'm sure he has absolutely no problems with anyone contributing Windows or Mac OS drivers.

Also, I believe the point of the hardware is to bring it down to a price where proper colour management and display calibration are far more accessible to a wider audience. If you're a working photographer or graphics designer, dropping a few hundred dollars on a commercial colourimeter is just a business expense and not a big deal.

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