Colormunki for projector profiling?

[sposch]

My club is looking at purchasing a device for profiling our projector. Has anyone tried the Colormunki for this? The Colormunki's hardware is a Spectrophotometer as opposed to a Colorimeter in the Spyder3Elite so I'm assuming it might be more accurate? Also the Munki is less than 1/2 the price of the Eye-One Beamer.
Any other hardware recommendations are appreciated as well.

Thanks. Steve.

[Raw shooter]

My club is looking at purchasing a device for profiling our projector. Has anyone tried the Colormunki for this? The Colormunki's hardware is a Spectrophotometer as opposed to a Colorimeter in the Spyder3Elite so I'm assuming it might be more accurate? Also the Munki is less than 1/2 the price of the Eye-One Beamer.
Any other hardware recommendations are appreciated as well.

Thanks. Steve.

Yes, tried it with the original software - horrible results.  I bought it for projectors and the results were so flat out pitiful that I returned the Monkey.

I tried every possible technique, got nowhere.  Never get those 3 days back though!
Buyer beware.

[sposch]

Ouch! I just purchased one and will be trying it on our projector tomorrow. I'll update with the results, hopefully I have better luck than you (praying for low sunspot activity). At least I have a profile made with a Spyder2Pro (which isn't too bad) to compare the results with. I don't know what the old SW was like but the current version goes through about 90 color patches and I'm fairly optimistic. I tried pointing it at my laptop screen just to test the SW and it didn't do as bad as I expected.

Steve.

[Horatio]

I would like to know how you make out.
I also have the device and have profiled in my home set up. I would like to know how you make out at the camera club as the hardware must be a certain distance from the screen.
This will put it in front of the projector and may be in the way of the projected image? When I profiled I was close enough to the screen that I just had it set up on top of the projector.
It is pretty finicky (is that a word) as to where you point the beam.
The projector I have is the Canon x700. After using slide projectors for many years what I do not like about digital projectors is the blowing out of anything white.
I am actually using a neutral density filter on the front of the projector to try and get some detail back. It seems to help as this projector has 4000 lumens.
It will probably be great when I project in a larger auditorium.

[sposch]

Well, I just got back from profiling our projector. Now I know how it got it's name...there was a lot of munkiing around.
First of all we couldn't get the Munki to measure the light off the screen. We are using an Optoma EP739 which is rated at 2500 Lumens and a 12'X9' projection screen (White non beaded) and project to fill the screen. In order to get the Munki to read the screen we had to move the projector closer to the screen and the projected image was 6' across before it was bright enough to start to take measurements. Turning up the brightness setting of the projector made the image brighter but not enough so we set it back to it's default. After going through that we thought we had it made, the Munki went through all the color patches (around 90 of them) and gave us a profile. It looked terrible, bad colors (Blue=Magenta) and low contrast.

After thinking about it for a few minutes I started to wonder if somehow the laptop's (PC) current monitor profile (which I had created previously with the Munki) was interfering with the process. I went into the display settings and changed the default profile to sRGB, restarted the laptop and profiled it again (Still had to keep the display size at 6' for it to measure though) , this time the profile looked quite good. We moved the projector back to it's regular distance and bumped up the brightness setting a few points to compensate for some of the light loss from the greater distance,ran through some images and are satisfied with the results. We'll know for sure after our monthly evaluation night next week.

In conclusion It looks like X-Rite has some problems to resolve, first either the Munki doesn't have enough sensitivity for this job or there is a software problem with reading the levels (I suppose there is a slight chance that the voltage drop was too great through the extended USB cables or that the laptop wasn't putting out sufficient power on the USB bus).
The rest of the problem appears to be with the software not writing to the video card correctly.

 After we were finished I noticed a profile called XRite_LinearProfile had been created in the process. I'm assuming this should have been loaded into the video card's Look Up Table before the measuring routine was started but never was. I just compared the linear profile to sRGB on my laptop when I got home and they look about the same. Next time we profile the Projector I'll load the Linear profile into the LUT before starting (unless X-Rite resolves the issue first).

I hope my experience helps anyone else planning to Munki around with their projector.

Steve.

[Frank Doorhof]

Calibrating projectors is something that is different from calibrating a monitor.
First off you have much less output when measuring towards the screen.

I'm an ISF tech and use a totally different setup for my PC/MAC colormanagment and calibrating TVs and projectors.
Best bet for projectors is the Gretag Eye one beamer which is a spectrum radio meter that measures of the screen.
REMEMBER however that you have to do grayscale only and CMS only.

When you try to make a profile the output will be horrible.
Projectors nowadays should be calibrated to a as flat as possible grayscale (dE below 3 or 5).
Use a gamma of 2.3 for the REC709 colorspace (HDTV) and 2.2 for REC601 (SD)

Than for the colorspace get software like colorfacts that allow you to see the colorspaces, choose the HDTV colorspace and calibrate the projector to fit the colorspace.
Some projectors will allow this with the so called CMS system (also some TV sets have this option).

Use saturation to adjust the triangle to fit the target.
WHEN DONE.
Do a colordecoder check (this can be done with a filter set which is delivered with many calibration DVDs/BDs) and adjust the colordecoder with the CMS brightness settings.

Now start at the beginning and check and readjust everything again.

In a nutshell that's a calibration for a projection system.

Spyders and the eyeone monitor are way to inaccurate for projection systems.
It's not cheap but you will benefit from it in a BIG way.
Otherwise hire an ISF tech (I do the calibrations in the Netherlands).
They are not cheap but it's worth the money.