1. A method for characterizing a color variation of a color output device, the method comprising: printing a set of similar color patches using the color output device; determining calorimetric values for each color patch; calculating a standard deviation value for each of the colorimetric values; calculating a numerical value that is a function of the standard deviation values and that represents a colorimetric deviation of the set; characterizing the color variation of the color output device based on the calculated numerical value; and outputting a signal representative of the characterized color variation.