[Openicc] X-Rite to aquire GreytagMacbeth

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 1 Feb 2006, Hal V. Engel wrote:
>
> You may be correct that X-Rite views Unix as meaning Solaris.  But this seems
> like a very limited view of this market segment.  If they have drivers for
> Solaris then it should be possible for them to generalize these to work with
> a broader set of POSIX platforms without too much difficulty.  In addition
> Solaris 10 supports SPARC, x86 and x86_64 hardware so this means that any
> X-Rite drivers available for Solaris should already support those hardware
> architectures. I also did a search of available products for Solaris on the
> Sun web site and it does list vendor name X-Rite product name DTP70 as
> available for the x86 but not for SPARC.

It is important to understand who is meant by "they".  My 
understanding of "they" in this case is Sun + Kodak and not X-Rite. 
Long ago, Sun and Kodak conspired together and produced KCMS as well 
as the basic definitions for ICC CMS profiles.  KCMS provides a full 
(if perhaps dated) CMS so X-Rite software is not required.  Most 
likely X-Rite provides protocol specifications under NDA.

> I think we already have an example in the video driver area that could show
> the way for this market segment.  Video drivers if anything are much more

Yes.  But it is important to notice that video card vendors make most 
of their profit from selling hardware while spectrophotometer vendors 
make most of their profit from selling software and specialized 
services.  This is easy to see based on how much the price of offered 
packages varies based on software features.  We would need to offer 
the ability to make money primarily based on selling hardware since it 
is likely that profile generation support would be based on open 
source software.

> Bob's idea of banding together in a visible way sounds good but how can we be
> more visable?  We have members of the ICC who are on this list and I would
> suspect that at least some of the vendors in this area have some awareness of
> it's existence.  What else can we do?   I think that this is what we should
> be talking about.

Members of ICC may not represent much money.  If companies like 
Disney, Autodesk, DreamWorks, Industrial Light & Magic, Sony and other 
companies already using Linux for serious work (see 
http://linuxmovies.movieeditor.com/studios.html for a partial listing 
of film studios) can identify themselves as interested Linux 
customers, then it is more clear that there is a viable market. 
These companies represent thousands of screens to be calibrated.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/