Printer, Camera, and Scanner Color Gamut Comparisons
These pages contain comparative color gamuts for a selection of the digital cameras, scanners, and printers and papers we have measured through our custom ICC printer profiling service. The plots display the color gamut of each printer, digital camera, or scanner in relation to Adobe RGB and sRGB.
The gamut plots are 3-D VRML models, allowing you to examine the color range from any perspective. You can twist and turn the plots using your mouse. This allows you to see where the strengths and weaknesses of any particular printer's color reproduction lie. You can select the color spaces you wish to compare, or view any of the pre-built models that compare a single color space to Adobe RGB and sRGB. The print contrast ratio associated with each combination appears on the pre-built plots.
Additional printer/paper combinations will be added as time permits. There are a number of two dimensional plots in the miscellaneous section, comparing a larger number of papers than would be legible in three dimensions.
A VRML browser plug-in is required to view the plots. If you do not see an animation in the area above, you need to download a plug-in.
Sources for free VRML plug-ins include:
General browser note: Upgrading or updating your browser may require re-installing the selected VRML plug-in. If you get strange error messages or your browser offfers to open a "gamutmodel.php" page, reinstalling the plugin is required.
Note for Windows users: The best overall plug-in for rendering complex scenes such as our Gamut models is the "New" (new implies c. 2005) Cosmo Player. It is fast, free, high quality, and fairly stable on Firefox 3 (V3.0.8 as of mid-April 2009) and on IE8. Setup for IE7 can involve playing with the rendering options to avoid errors. Some VRML files cause crashes, although the models on our site appear to work. The Cortona plug-ins are more stable, although you need to match the version to your browser and rendering speed is slower.
Note for Mac users: The only VRML browser plug-in left standing that does not require building from source code is Octaga. It is slower than one would like to render complex models, but it does work.
Operating System |
|||
Win |
Mac |
Linux |
|
| "New" Cosmo Player (fast, high quality, no watermark; finicky IE7 setup) | X1 |
||
Octaga 2.2 (high quality, albeit slow, rendering, use "offline installation") |
X2 |
X |
X |
| BS Contact 7.1 (fast, free version has annoying watermark, use "manual download") | *3 |
||
ParallelGraphics Cortona 3D Viewer (stable, IE7 requires "manual setup", Beta V6 works - slowly - in IE8 and FF3.0.8) |
*4 |
||
FreeWRL (a build-your-own project) |
X |
X |
|
OpenVMRL (another build-your-own project) |
X |
X |
|
Vivaty Player Beta 1.0 (unusably slow for complex scenes) |
X5 |
||
Key:
- X Works on major browsers for platform (Windows: FF3, IE7, IE8; Mac: FF3, Safari 3; Linux: FF3)
- * Partial browser support, See note below.
Notes:
- Using Cosmo Player with IE7 requires manually selecting "Direct3D" rendering mode if an error occurs. No problems seen with either FF3.0.8 or IE8.
- Octaga 2.2 renders complex scenes such as our gamut plots very slowly. Prepare to wait a while before anything useful appears on-screen.
- BS Contact does not work with IE8. FF3 and IE7 are supported.
- The "stable" version 5.1 of Cortona does not support IE8 and is buggy in FF3.0.8. Installing it in IE7 works best if "manual Setup" is selected on the ParallelGraphics site. The "Beta V6" version of Cortona works well in both IE8 and FF3.0.8.
- The Vivaty Player works with all tested browsers. That's the good news. Unfortunately it took many minutes to render even moderately complex scenes on a quad-core, 3GHz system.
Use the Interactive Gamuts tool to choose from all color spaces
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