You have to have Production House or higher to do profiling in Onyx. Postershop won't do it. The i1 works fine with Onyx. The X-Rite i1 does not come with software that will make a profile for Onyx.
Colors will be improved by profiling. The issue of drying before takeup comes from setting ink limits at the beginning of profiling, before you ever even use the spectrophotometer. If you're over-inking, a lot of your muddy colors may be from that.
You Need Production House for x10 to build profiles. And yes you can build profiles outside of Onyx in the xRite Publisher software. Onyx is far simpler and more intuitive for our industry though and Onyx 19 makes it even easier. If it were me I'd buy the ioI1 Pro 3 Basic and upgrade to Onyx 19.Unclebun, are you sure it's not Postershop vs RIP Center that you need for ICC Profiling? I've been trying to keep myself up on what the minimum RIPs are out there that can do profiling inside themselves and this PDF from ONYX seems to indicate Postershop is okay... ? Or am I missing something?
PosterShop can make a profile all the way up to the point of making the ICC profile. It cannot do that part (which is kind of essential). Before I upgraded to ProductionHouse, I used a couple of profiles I made with PosterShop, and because the ink limits and settings were correct for the media I made them for, they worked better than canned profiles even though they didn't have ICC profiles.
Now that I have ProductionHouse, the profiles I make are way better.
And the OP has v10Onyx added custom ICC profile functionality to the Postershop package in version 11.1