The information superhighway is upon us. It is now commonplace to see business users manipulating pictures and video on their desktop machines, and there is increasing demand to network these machines to share information with others. Visual images will be the currency of the information age, and the spoils will go to companies that accurately reproduce these images.A major barrier to image reproduction is accurate colour rendition. Current solutions require complex, expensive and lengthy calibration procedures. Yet the dream of the information superhighway is to provide ubiquitous access to multimedia information. To achieve this, systems must be easy to use: for colour displays, this means that device calibration must be virtually transparent. This paper describes a user-centred method to achieve this that is simple and quick, and eventually may be good enough for most mass-market multimedia applications.