Richard Hughes has announced an open hardware project to produce a cheap display calibration device to work in accord with established Linux software like the Gnome Color Manager which he has also worked on. He is currently looking for pre-orders to get the production of the devices up and running.

The ColorHug is a small accessory that measures displayed colors very accurately. It is held on your display and plugged into a spare USB port on the computer for the duration of the calibration.

Have you ever taken a photo and wondered why it does not look the same on your screen as it did the camera? It’s probably because the LCD display on your computer has never been calibrated. This means colors can look washed-out, tinted with certain shades or with different color casts.

About 2 years ago I began working on color management in Linux. It soon became apparent that there was no integrated color management system. The color management support which did exist was often disabled by default in many applications. I have worked hard to make calibrating displays easy ever since. It is my goal to make color management accessable to end users. The hardware for color managing screens was bulky, slow and expensive. With a background in electronics, I thought I could create a device which was smaller, faster and cheaper. Using the ColorHug it takes about a minute to take several hundred measurements from which the client software creates an ICC color profile. This color profile file can then be saved and used to make colors look correct on your monitor.

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Richard Hughes has announced an open hardware project to produce a cheap display calibration device to work in accord with established Linux software like the Gnome Color Manager which he has also worked on. He is currently looking for pre-orders to get the production of the devices up and running. The ColorHug is a small ...