Opinion: Microsoft is teaming up with Canon for color management in Vista. What will this mean for platform-agnostic apps, and how will WCS affect the end user?For an industry columnist, pacing the news is often a necessity; however, forward-looking speculation is more fun. Last week, I did a column about Microsoft's intention to include an innovative but proprietary color management system in Vista. This week's follow-up allows me speculate about the implications of WCS for the consumer and the color vendors.
Before I get to the speculative part, let me say that I have discarded any initial skepticism regarding the technical viability of Microsoft's design. I have started to understand Microsoft's arguments a bit better. I am now confident that if it is carefully implemented, the final quality of results will be at least as good as those obtained with present-day ICC methodology.
Today's consumer user experience with color is abysmal. Getting accurate color out of a consumer printer like an Epson requires the concentration of Master Yoda. Worse, when you make mistakes and your print looks faded or oversaturated there's no route to diagnose and fix the ICC workflow other than trial and error. Even the simple task of getting a decent display profile can drive your averagely obsessive photographer to distraction.
So, anything Microsoft does to merge color management seamlessly into Windows will be an immediate substantial improvement, and, who knows, by Version 3 they'll probably get it right. Also, users seem happier these days with administering and debugging Windows systems, and I would hope that the user procedures with color would fit in with the rest of Windows—the ICC workflow on the Mac under Tiger has become a real mess.
More surprisingly, some comments I've read on the Apple Colorsync list confirm that WCS also addresses some fundamental inadequacies of the ICC design, and that improvements here could trickle down to professional users. Now that you see me convinced that this has a chance of working, let's move on to the speculative part:
1. As soon as a central color control panel is implemented in Windows, the computer industry's attitude toward color management will change for the better. Color will be mentioned on sales documents for monitors and printers, with more descriptive labeling. Reviewers will find tools to test and ways to describe and compare the color experience. Device manufacturers will all supply drivers for WCS.
2. Monitor calibration hardware will be commoditized. Every computer has a display, and calibrating this monitor means hooking up a screensucker "puck" to the screen. Nowadays, special software is used to drive the puck and calculate a screen profile. I believe these pucks will become commoditized in much the same way as mice. Maybe Microsoft and Logitech will act as brand leaders. I forecast pucks falling to less than $50 within two years of Vista's release. I also forecast that most branded monitors will come bundled with a puck, just as branded computers are bundled with a mouse.
3. DDC monitors will go mainstream. At the moment, some LCD panels use a protocol called DDC to take their setup orders from the computer. Parameters such as brightness can be adjusted by software, which makes calibration a hands-off process. Various proprietary extensions of the DDC protocol allow the color response of a monitor to be more finely tuned. Such extensions have been implemented by LaCie, Nec, Quato and, of course, Eizo. However, these are high-end displays marketed to photographers and graphic designers. My contention is that software tuning of the monitor via DDC will go mainstream soon after calibration hardware gets cheaper and more widely adopted, as described in point 2.
4. Now for the software vendors. Fairly quickly, today's low-end monitor calibration packages will join the desaparecido dinosaurs. No added value: Windows uses mouse drivers, it'll use puck drivers. WCS will be able to make a basic monitor profile on its own, thank you very much. Do you really care which Indian firm wrote those mouse drivers that come with your Shanghai-born cordless rodent ?
5. Print profiling will follow monitor profiling down the slope of commoditization. Ink-jet profiling will go mainstream, and intensive-use output devices such as laser printers in offices will become self-calibrating.
6. We'll see an emerging market for color-tweaking add-on software: Modules will plug into the Color control panel and help you tune the colors, e.g., adjust the color temperature of the monitor a bit to match a known type of ambient lighting, or make your prints more saturated or slightly cooler, etc. These should be much more user friendly than today's profile editors.
7. ICC will hang on forever because it has the greatest force in nature going for it: inertia. However, ICC will get crowded out of the consumer market, and maybe the office market, fairly quickly; its protected ecological niche is the printing industry and the prepress sector. The high-end software profiling packages will survive. But then the print industry is where ICC was really conceived, and maybe they deserve to keep using it. This monster should never have been let loose on Joe Public.
Now we're done with the predictions—and just remember, science makes progress toward the truth through the falsification and corroboration of theories.
There remains one interesting question: Adobe is officially platform-agnostic. How will they handle it if native consumer color becomes better on Windows than professional color on the Mac?
And here come the opinions: Proprietary data formats are evil. In the end they cause major annoyances for the whole of an industry. Even if WCS works, keeping it proprietary is a bad thing. Maybe the clients of the printing industry, who buy a lot of data processing equipment, could get that point across to Microsoft's Josh Weisberg, who so nicely answered my Q&A. Have no fear, I'm sure he's the sort to sit quietly on chairs, not throw them.
