[Accacin]

He wrote a pretty detailed blog article explaining his issues and how he got around them, this is all very useful information to someone who is looking to do something similar.

Spending €100 also isn't an insignificant amount, and for that price I would expect what I'm buying to work properly.

[hughsient]

The ColorHug is a colorimeter designed to calibrate screens with an approximately-sRGB gamut. If you're trying to calibrate a wide-gamut screen with a ColorHug it isn't going to work very well. If you need to do anything other than consumer hardware you need to use a spectrophotometer (that can do spectral profiling) rather than a colorimter that's calibrated to different primaries than what it's trying to measure. A spectro is going to cost you at least $300, and a good one is going to cost you somewhat more.

Source: Person that designed the ColorHug hardware.

[Accacin]

I get what you're saying, but when he plugged it in it didn't work. Even if he was trying to do what it's supposed to do he would have had problems.

I'd like to add I'm completely appreciative and thankful of what you're doing.

[willtim]

The BenQ monitor used in the article appears to be just "100% sRGB‎" and not wide-gamut.

[seba_dos1]

I don't understand that attitude, that's a pretty low price for a niche open hardware device.

[hughsient]

It's barely more than the device costs to make. It turns out making batches of 50 at a time is an order of magnitude more expensive than building them 50,000 at a time.

Source: Am the person that sits in a shed and builds each ColorHug.

[seba_dos1]

Just what I suspected :) Thanks for doing it anyway!

[giovannicarruba]

It's not. An Eizo EX3 sells for 85 bucks here, a Spyder 5 for 95. A ColorHug2 amounts to 115. Since the ColorHug2 doesn't include the actual calibration software, it is equal to the EX3. Paying 35% more just for the "Open Hardware" label and then not being able to reap the expected benefits (better support etc.) doesn't sound like a good deal.

[seba_dos1]

It is.

Better support? Open Hardware means Open Hardware, and nothing more - you get the access to the schematics, documentation, sometimes also right to produce similar devices by yourself. You can expect greater hackability, definitely, but "Open Hardware" sticker means nothing in terms of support or reliability. It might be better, it might be worse, you can't tell.

The price in such projects is directly related to the production scale. How many EX3s, Spyders and ColorHugs have been produced? Open Hardware projects (especially the equivalents of already available non-free devices) are often costlier because it initially attracts only the people who really care about its hackability, which makes the yields low, which makes the prices high, which further strengthens that relation, and the circle is closed.

With userbase kept small, most users usually keep the firmware/software support just right enough to scratch their own itches.

Please remember that hardware is not software, and open hardware comes with completely different set of challenges than free (open) software and when it comes to hardware, you often really need to pay extra for the freedom - not just with your time, like we were used to with early FLOSS, but also with your money. If you choose a project because of its "Open Hardware" sticker, it's really more than likely that it will be costlier and it will be rough at edges, because it's usually harder to roll with such projects than with closed competitors and the ROIs are usually way smaller too. That's just how it is and there's nothing surprising about it; if you care about openness, you have to accept it, otherwise it will never get better.

[rootw0rm]

This is one of the more important comments here, imo. Open hardware != free software. As someone who's been in the unfortunate position of having to work with locked down chips on many occasions, just simply having access to proper documentation is awesome. It can take a lot of work and dedication to interface with open hardware, but we all benefit when the fruits of that labor are shared. This is a struggle we should all be willing to undertake.

[ancientworldnow]

The EX3 and Spyder are not good probes. The cheapest quality probe I know of is the xrite i1 display pro. Everything below that is basically a toy. I've never used a ColorHug though so I'm not sure how it stacks up.

As for software, DisplayCal is actually very well regarded in pro color and considered one of the only serious three choices, the others being CalMAN and the big dog being Light Illusions.

[giovannicarruba]

What attitude? Paying for something and then expecting it to actually work?

[serf]

The attitude that the cost gap between products in the same category will not be accounted for elsewhere in the user experience or product quality.

tl;dr : you get what you pay for.

[Filligree]

Cost gap? You mean, the ColorHug being more expensive than the other alternatives which work better?

Ok, but I'm not sure how that explains it. You'll need to go into more detail.

[seba_dos1]

As with most Open Hardware projects, you pay extra for the mere fact of the device's existence. Without paying extra, it wouldn't exist, because producing stuff in small amounts is way more expensive per device than producing them in high volumes.

[hedora]

Many people would like to see open hardware succeed, so they get annoyed when they watch yet another open hardware company sell a broken product, which inevitably leads to bankruptcy, and then starts the “Linux will never work out of the box” cycle anew.

We’ve seen this play out dozens of times since the ‘90s, and the startups keep making the same mistakes.

They should at least read their predecessors retrospectives, and strive to make different mistakes.