Checking Your Display

Until an instrument has read your screen, the colours on it are a promise made by a profile. With an X-Rite i1Display on the screen the Ink Drawdown page measures what it shows, corrects it, and says how close it got.

What you need

Two small pieces, no administrator rights: the Bridge extension in Chrome, Edge or Brave, and the Bridge helper program on your computer. Both come from ChromaChecker. The Instruments page has both and shows whether they are installed. Readings never leave your browser.

What Measure does

StepWhat is readWhy
whitethe display's full whiteevery Lab is computed against it
paperthe chosen neutralhow far the paper is from its Lab
aimthe ink, iteratedthe display is corrected until it reads the aim
the pictureevery variant, a few readings eacheach patch gets its own correction

The line under the square then reads Ink: 0.09 ΔE • Substrate: 0.18 ΔE • 8 variants within 1 ΔE. The dot in front is yellow until the picture has been iterated, green when every patch landed within 1 ΔE, red when any did not. A patch the display cannot reach carries a warning triangle; hover it for the number. Any change of the picture clears the marks — measure again.

What the numbers mean

A browser draws colour in 8 bits per channel, so the smallest step it can make is about 0.25–0.5 ΔE00. Residuals of 0.1–0.3 are the floor, not an error. Above 1 ΔE the colour is outside what the display can show, usually a saturated ink on an sRGB screen. A colorimeter also has its own errors on a given backlight; the correction is relative to the white it measured, which cancels most of them.

A checked display is a good comparison, not a standard. The judgement that matters is still made on the physical drawdown under the booth. The screen tells you what to expect before it arrives.

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