Due this month for approximately US$1,800, the CRS is engineered to deliver “stable, accurate, and repeatable” color results for design applications used by graphics professionals, photographers, and engineers. The Artisan CRS includes a 21-inch (19.8-inch viewable) Sony GDM-C520K display, display hood, USB color sensor, and software. The display is Mac compatible. However, there’s no information on Sony’s site about system requirements for the included software.
The flat display has FD Trinitron and aperture grille technologies, as well as the aforementioned attachable display hood that helps to control unwanted glare. The color sensor is a puck-sized device physically applied to the display; it works in conjunction with Sony’s software to read and communicate the color spectrum to the displayed image.
The Artisan CRS adjusts bias and gain to achieve accurate color and perfectly neutral grays, according to Sony. Users can toggle between different industry color spaces including RGB-D50 (professional printers), RGB-65 (consumer and digital photography), and SRGB-D65 (Web publishing).
The Artisan CRS implements color consistency through a constant contrast ratio by anchoring white and black. Controlling contrast and brightness is entirely automated. And there are built-in controls for ambient light conditions. The Artisan CRS’ one-touch color system software always calibrates to an absolute specification in order to keep color representation homogeneous on a daily basis, Sony said.