For artists, photographers and animators it’s often essential to be working with an accurately color calibrated screen. It’s also important to be able to print accurate colors being sure the hard copy matches what is shown on the display.

The OpenHardware ColorHug Colorimeter device provided an inexpensive way to calibrate some types of screen, and is now being used by over 2000 people. Due to limitations because of the low cost hardware, it does not work well on high-gamut or LED screen technologies which are now becoming more common.

ColorHug Spectro is a new device designed as an upgrade to the original ColorHug. This new device features a mini-spectroraph with UV switched illuminants. This means it can also take spot measurements of paper or ink which allows us to profile printers and ensure we have a complete story for color management on Linux.

I’m asking anyone perhaps interested in buying a device in about 9 months time to visit this page which details all the specifications so far. If you want to pre-order, just send us an email and we’ll add you to the list. If there isn’t at least 100 people interested, the project just isn’t economically viable for us as there are significant NRE costs for all the optics.

Please spread the word to anyone that might be interested. I’ve submitted a talk to LGM to talk about this too, which hopefully will be accepted.