What Color Measurement Instrument Is Right For Me

As the global leader in color science and technology, X‐Rite offers the industry’s widest range of color measurement instruments – colorimeters, densitometers, spectrodensitometers and spectrophotometers. While the commonality between many of our instruments is to measure color, each has its own particular use case and they are not easily interchangeable. Each X‐Rite instrument has been designed and optimized to precisely meet the needs and requirements of specific applications and markets. Choosing the right tool for the right job is crucially important. After all, wouldn’t a dentist be ill advised to use a hammer drill instead of a dental drill on his patients’ teeth?

To the untrained or novice user of color management tools, the differences between instruments may seem subtle at first. In the printing world choosing the wrong instrument can have very detrimental repercussions. A color management instrument designed for pre‐press applications such as the i1, should not be used in the pressroom for a number of reasons, and conversely using a 500 Series device or SpectroEye for prepress applications would present different, but equally pressing issues.