Confusion About X-Rite i1Display Pro Licensing Clearing Up

Yesterday we got a mass email from BabelColor who make some great tools for playing with colour and assessing monitors, amongst other things.

It was a really odd email, essentially encouraging us (and the HUGE number of people they sent it to) to mount a campaign directed at X-Rite to force them to license their i1Display Pro for use with third party packages (like Eizo’s ColorNavigator and NEC SpectraView, for instance) – this email claimed this was not going to happen due to new and draconian licensing from X-Rite. And I’ve seen this same (mis)information presented by lots of other people in various forums, particularly some of the makers of third party home cinema calibration software who hang out at the AVS Forum for calibration.

Forums are one thing, and misinformation there is bad enough, but it’s also so frequent that most intelligent people have long since concluded that most forums are mostly a waste of time, but this very public email was pretty unprofessional – for two main reasons – one, it appears they may have broken an NDA (so say X-Rite anyway), and two, it was entirely based on misinformation. Information that is pretty easy to get and X-Rite, if asked, have been answering these questions for the last few weeks.

Still, it had flushed out some more public responses from X-Rite on the ColorSync mailing list (a pretty unpleasant place for the most part, LOTS of bickering!)….

Anyway, the upshot of this is…..Eizo have gone public and announced that shortly, ColorNavigator 6.1 (as ever, free for all Eizo CG users) will be released with X-Rite i1DisplayPro support. BasicColor have also announced support is coming, and X-Rite say a number of other manufacturer’s are not far away from announcing support. Indeed, it seems likely that most, if not all the current packages that support the i1Display 2 will be updated to support the i1Display Pro – although it’s apparently NOT trivial to do that as the new calibrator is a much more advanced piece of equipment. So time scales of some months are likely in many cases before we see the final releases with i1Display Pro
support.

Looks like BabelColor jumped the gun a bit and should have tried talking directly to X-Rite about it before they mass mailed thousands of customers….(and X-Rite, for their part, and as ever, and for years now) – could be MUCH much better at clearly communicating to their customers).

So – kudos to Eizo for being the first to match up the best calibrators with their top class monitors and for helping in clearing up the FUD. Here’s hoping the other giant in this area follows suit soon….