I have owned a GretagMacbeth SpectroScan for ten years. It was, and is, a very handy tool for measuring color targets to make ICC profiles.

I also own an X-Rite DTP-41, which is another handy instrument for the same purpose. And, I have an iOne Pro, and a Monaco Profiler instrument.


My university recently acquired an iOne Isis spectrophotometer made by X-Rite. This one changes the rules of the ga...Read More

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I ride my bicycle from home to school, and then I park it in my “private parking space” which is the basement storage area of the Graphic Arts Building, right behind the Shakespeare Press Museum. In that space are such treasures as stacks of old forklift batteries, rows and rows of old computers, CRT monitors, skids of paper, rolls of pressure-sensitive adhesive material, etc., etc.

And an occasional treasure!

On a shelf down there the other day I found a box of stripping tools. This is a blast from the past! It’s a snapshot of how film assembly was done a couple of decades back. That small box bears the name Mergenthaler Linotype Company. That box itself is an antique, as it once held a roll of photographic paper for the Linofilm SuperQuick phototypesetter. Linotype was in Plainview, N.Y. then, and had not moved to Hauppauge where the com...Read More

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Many people tout the success of Vista Print and their “free” business card printing program. And many printers envy the obvious success of Vista Print’s extensive marketing program. But, when marketing crosses the line and becomes spam, then it’s time to say “Enough already!”

VistaPrint offers free business cards to anyone who is willing to have the VistaPrint logo printed on the reverse of their cards. They will also print a host of commercial printing from online orders for pay. Their prices are very low, and they have an impressive web site offering all kinds of printed products.

The problem is that they also offer “partnership opportunities” to individuals who co-market VistaPrint’s services. This is not unlike various pyramid marketing methods used by cosmetics companies over the last two decades. ...Read More

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Once in a while I encounter a situation that really needs attention. Years ago, when I signed up for Internet service with a local supplier, I discovered that they had not restricted my access to other people’s accounts.

I typed .. (two periods in a row) one day in the directory, and was suddenly at the root of their server. I had access, seemingly, to everyone’s accounts.

I sent a note to the account administrator, who fired back a note saying that what I had done was impossible. So, I sent a note to the owner of the business, who also responded that it was impossible.

Knowing that doing this was illegal and unethical, (but concerned that if I could access all of the accounts, that someone else in their server could access mine) I went into the accounts again, opened the owner’s e-mail folder, opened one ...Read More

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I’ve been carrying a Macintosh PowerBook since the early 1990s when they became available. I used them primarily for making presentations to audiences around the world.

My first was a PowerBook 170. It was a black and white machine with a track ball and a mouse-clicker on the front edge. It was well-made, fast enough to use on the road, and a pretty good computer for staying in touch with the world while traveling. Over the years I upgraded to the PowerBook 3400,* a machine that could present in color, and then, when they became available, a Macintosh PowerBook G4 12-inch laptop computer with the aluminum shell. I have had that one since the first few months they had been available. That was almost six years ago.

My affair with the 12-inch machine was enduring. It is small and light. I always argued that it was the size and weight of – a book. I...Read More

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I promised a week or so back that I would report back with news about my experience with the Color Munki as a projector calibrator tool.

Here ’tis: I love it!

The Munki makes color palettes, profiles your computer display, and will make printer profiles. It’s a real 32-band spectrophotometer, and it’s modestly priced (under $500). I have now tried everything it will do, and I like all of the features of the Munki.

...Read More

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It’s finally Tuesday, November 4, 2008. This is my 125th blog. I have learned a lot, thought a lot, and I have learned to think in small editorial bits rather than epic-length works. It’s surprisingly difficult to write short blog-length editorials, and I hope that you in the blogsphere (blogdom?) are willing to put up with me longer.


Today is the day that our country votes. Interestingly, and surprisingly in one state 41 percent of eligible voters have already voted. That’s almost twice as many as voted in the 2004 election. That, in itself, is an amazing statistic about the election we’re having today.


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I usually take the escalator up from the show floor at GraphExpo to the classroom level. I do this because it gives me an aerial view of the show floor about half way up.

From there I can assess the size and “excitement” of the show. This year was pretty good. There was a lot of traffic, many new, small businesses with displays of their wares. It was a GraphExpo like many others – one big McCormick Place hall filled with equipment and customers.

But GraphExpo is not Print (that’s next year). The GraphExpo show is always shorter – just four days total. As a result, it seems pretty quiet. And, considering that all the manufacutrers had spent their shipping and installation budgets this year on DRUPA, it was a very good show.

The seminars were well-attended. Mine was, at least. I stuck my head into Sandee Cohen&rsqu...Read More

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Several times in recent years companies have made a stab at integrating print and web URL addresses with technologies that can read codes in pages, and then direct a computer to the right place.

One of these was Digimarc, an Oregon-based company whose copyright embedding technology is embedded in Adobe Photoshop, among other places. That technology changes the least-significant bit of pixels in an image to encode text that can later be decoded by Photoshop. The image is modified slightly (you can see the encoding in some images), but the technique is effective, and it can thwart copyright infringement. About five years ago, Digimark tried, without much success, to use this technology to print digital messages in ads.

The problem with the Digimarc approach to getting consumers from the printed page to the web was that...Read More

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As I traveled this week to Chicago, Illinois to attend the GraphExpo show, I spent far too long in airports (my flights were delayed on Monday by only seven hours). A side benefit of that is that I got to sample the Phoenix Airport’s many restaurants, gift shops and coffee shops. Hudson News, the nearly-ubiquitous airport newsstand, has magazine racks near the ends of the airport’s several concourses. I checked the available titles: Knitting Monthly, Threads, Maxim! and the two almost-identical Popular Science and Mechanics magzines.


I picked up the new issue of Pop Mechanics and was admiring the 300 mpg car on the cover when I realized that the magazine has gotten significantly smaller than the last time I saw i...Read More

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In my blog a few days back I described my love affair with ColorThink Pro, the color visualization and analysis tool from Chromix. In addition to its ability to compare profiles against other profiles in both 2D and 3D space, the program has a Workbook view, which is like Excel for color.

In this mode, you open the Color Worksheet, then put an image into the worksheet, and then apply a “work flow” to the image. The work flow can be as simple as applying a color profile (in my example here I am converting from RGB color to CMYK color using U.S. Sheet-fed Coated). The result can then be converted into a list of colors found in the image, and their Delta-E error value expressed in a variety of forms. Or, you can display the Delta-E error as a photo-map where green,...Read More

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This is a time of statistics, polls, numbers, numbers, numbers! I check the polls daily, watching the various polling agencies and their analysis of the voting public. It is amazing that these organizations can eek out a living by asking questions of 1,413 likely voters. The other part of my amazement is that 1,413 likely voters can statistically predict the outcome of an election with 141,647,783 voters (that number is provided by a WIKI of possible voters, and is based on statistics of the 2000 and 2004 elections).


The other part of polling that makes very little sense to me this year is that almost all the polls are taken over the telephone, using land lines. And the largest group of new voters in America is the 18-28 year-old group. None...Read More

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