People doing their own photo printing on office printers need to do their own color management, which means profiling screen and printer.

For screens, one usually employs a colorimeter puck. The best printer profiling solutions employ a spectrophotometer to measure a printed testchart.

After the latest round of consolidations, there are now basically three companies sharing the CMS (color management systems) market for photographers: Gretag MacBeth, Colorvision and Xrite.

GMB (Gretag Macbeth) is best known for the Eye-One line: Eye-One Display colorimeters for screens, and Eye-One Pro for spectrophotometers printers.

Gretag has been making high-end professional color measuring instrumentation for some time, and is now gradually moving downmarket. Unfortunately, precise technology does not necessarily mean usability, as anyone who has watched an Eye-One scrape the ink off a proof can attest.

Colorvision is, in a sense, the opposite of GMB. They have realized that screen calibrators are now a mass product.

They are best known for their Spyder line of screen suckers. This company is aiming straight for consumers and moving toward a $100 price point.

So far, they certainly have their market and their pricing right, but I would judge them much stronger on marketing than on technology.

Xrite is somewhere in the middle between the above. They were successful in the CMYK print-room with their DTP 41 spectro, but they had remained fairly static for a long time, and were not regarded as a major player in the photography market. Then, in a burst of activity, they acquired Monaco, a maker of profiling software, and at the big DRUPA printing conference last year suddenly released a wholly revamped product line.

Xrite now sells, among other products, an affordable ($1000) scan-ruler based printer profiling system named Pulse, which competes head-on with Gretag's Eye-One Pro, as well as a speed-demon chart-eating automatic system nicknamed "Slingshot," officially catalogued as "DTP70."

Xrite is also vying to grab a large share of the exploding screen calibration market with a screen puck named Optix, which again competes head-on with Gretag's Eye-One Display device.

I went to visit Xrite's Paris offices and was shown these various devices and allowed to play with some of them for a while. Below are my first impressions:

Optix, the screen profiler, comes in a base and a Pro version. The Pro version can do things like match screens.

The Optix device itself can read ambient light temperatures like the Eye-One—to do this I simply held it a few inches over some white paper on the desk.

The basic Optix software version only works with the bundled Xrite device (DTP94) and cost around $200. The Pro version plays nice with other devices, even those made by Gretag!

One nice feature of Optix is that the software can check an existing profile's validity, and will chart the drift of the screen over the period of time (weeks, months) it's been used to profile it.

I liked Optix, the DTP94 puck is cute, and it made one of the best profiles I ever got for my powerbook's LCD, with very little banding.

Moving upscale now, we have the various kits which contain the Pulse print profiler. Pulse can be supplied with or without Optix, with or without the case and accessories, with or without the CMYK option, etc.

The software can also profile scanners and cameras, but some of the testcharts and software modules are doubtless optional. Don't expect me to tell you exactly what you'll get in the kit you buy. My suggestion to Xrite: Tidy up your product matrix!

Anyway, the Pulse really comes into its own with the optional backing plate. This supplies a white surface which is usually beneficial to real world-profiling—the ISO standard black backing can be obtained by reversing the plate.

The backing plate niftily clamps a letter-sized testchart, while the standard supplied ruler keeps the spectro head floating some distance over the paper.

The result is an effortless to and fro movement over the paper, very different from the scratchy experience with GMB's Eye-One Pro.

A standard print profile can be made with a testchart of 343 or 729 patches.

Reading is fast but not immediate. Count five minutes or so to read a chart.

A diagram on the computer screen displays rows which have not been scanned, updated as you go. You can skip rows, and come back to them later.

Even better, the Pulse head can measure autonomously, so you can untether it, while measuring a chart, or even take spot measurements, which may be nifty for photographers or consultants out in the field.

After the iPod battery fiasco, I do wonder, however, how long—in years—the built-in rechargeable batteries will survive.

The bundled software can make profiles tailored to specific viewing conditions: Daylight, D50, D65, Tungsten Illuminant A, Cool White Fluorescent Illuminant F2 are the options I saw listed. This is a nice feature, as some Epson inkjets are known for strong metamerism.

I also got Mr. Hugues Pascal at Xrite to switch on his DTP70 (Slingshot) .

This is an automatic sheet reader, built like an inkjet printer in reverse: You insert a sheet and a head glides over the paper somewhere inside while it ingests the chart. It's very fast—I'd say about a minute and a half per sheet.

I looked at the DTP70 manual, and it would seem that a UV filter can be switched in and out of the optical path.

In summary, Slingshot seems ideal for people who need to make profiles in quantity, although the $4000+ price of the hardware may be beyond Father Christmas' budget. Also, don't expect to feed thick cardboard through that paper path.

At this point, I am not willing to make any sort of comment about the quality of the print profiles obtained, as I have not been able to try out the devices under my own usage conditions.

However, after my demo, I can attest to the careful physical design, nice software interface and attention to detail that have gone into Xrite's product range. These aspects of Xrite's design ensure a usability that is certainly far superior to GMB's.

As the core technology in each the two product ranges is very different. It will be interesting to watch GMB's and Xrite's face off in the market.

Both companies have a solid reputation for quality.

I have requested a loaner DTP70, which I will get for a couple of weeks after the summer—I hope to provide an update to this review at that point.

Edmund Ronald has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, but he is currently on a sabbatical as a photographer in Paris.