COLOR CONTROL -- Managing the Variables

The core of the problem was that equivalence in measurement does not equal equivalence in human perception, Carli explains. "Companies offering color management tools and services claimed you could run based on measurements alone."

For many years, developers also worked under a false assumption, the researcher asserts. "They had been trying to come up with silver-bullet solutions to problems that weren't important to people. What people in our study sample said they wanted most was to simply match two devices of the same type in the same medium," he notes.