Colour Reproduction on Tablet Devices

Abstract

With the advent of Internet and mobile devices client services and other print production are migrating more and more to online platforms. In a recent technology changeover it has become obvious that there is a growing number of printers and customers who are interested in the print service providers to expand their business to online and mobile platforms. With this technological transition there are some open questions regarding the possibilities of using tablet devices for colour soft proofing and other colour related operations. There are large similarities with desktop display devices but its operating systems are not colour smart yet. There have been some initial attempts to characterize the colour reproduction on this type of devices and find the possibility of using them not just for information content but also for colour managed content. In this study we have tested several tablets (Apple iPad2,Asus Transformer TF101, Samsung Galaxy Tab 1) with different display and OS technology and a software which is intended for colour managed reproduction view. We have measured tablets colour reproduction with the digital version of the GretagMacbeth ColourChecker card and calculated colour differences between colour chart data and displayed data. We have calibrated the Ipad2 with the only existing colour management tool, the Spyder Gallery, and we also tested the chart display with and without software colour correction. We have found that there are differences in the colour reproduction of display technologies and that the possibilities of a real colour managed workflow have yet to be resolved on the OS level of tablet and mobile devices.