Color Management Consolidation
X-Rite recently announced they have acquired Pantone. X-Rite is well-regarded as a top company in color, and for photographers that primarily revolves around equipment for monitor and printer calibration. Pantone is perhaps best known as the owner of “named colors” (as in “Pantone 583 C” is a beautiful shade of, uh, a color I don’t know the name of).
Keep in mind that this acquisition follows the not-too-long-ago merger between X-Rite and GretagMacbeth. This creates a single company in X-Rite that has a very high percentage of customers in terms of color management for photographers. ColorVision is the only other company that is really providing similar solutions for photographers.
This naturally leads to the question of whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing for photographers. In other words, will the consolidation create a more efficient company that is able to deliver even better technology faster and at a lower price? Or will it lead to higher prices as photographers (and others) find they don’t have as much choice in the marketplace?
Those who have read my books and articles (especially my book Color Confidence) know that I’ve always been a big fan of the products of both GretagMacbeth and X-Rite. So I see tremendous advantage in the fact that these companies have combined forces to bring their technology and development together in a (hopefully) more efficient way to give us even better products at lower prices. And based on my experience with the people at both companies, I really do think we’ll see that happening.
I know there will likely be many nay-sayers out there, and maybe those nay-sayers are right. But I have a feeling this may be an example of when consolidation can bring benefits to customers. We’ll see…
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