Digital BW, The Print

Martin,

I have been following this discussion for a while....  As one who should have 
bought stock in X-Rite years ago (5-instrument deep now), here are some 
thoughts.

- The DTP 41 is a defacto industry standard considered a "reasonably priced" 
alternative to the Gretag-Macbeth Spectrolino. It is built for commercial use 
and has _very solid_ tech support behind it, but it is not without its 
idyosyncracies. If you let it sit for a few months, you may need  to jump start 
the motors (using a command-line interface on the host computer), not a fun 
thing. If you buy it, opt for the UV attachment. 
What it doesn't do compared to the Spectrolino is that you cannot program 
several reads of the same patch, something that makes readings of noisy 
processes a bit more accurate (needed for art papers). You can work around 
that with the DTP-41 if your profiling software allows averaging among several 
reads - it's just not that convenient.

- The Digital Swatchbook and program that comes with it is a great instrument 
and software. You have the equivalent of a reflection densitometer with the 
convenience of instantly transfering data to the host computer, saving it and 
being able to export it. Really nice for doing any reflective densitometry 
(curves and such).  This is just a small bonus to the spectrophotometric 
abilites. As has been pointed out here, this is not an ideal instrument for 
profiling because a profile gets better with more patches which in turn gets 
tedious to do one at a time. But if all you are doing is filling out the CMYK data 
in Photoshop and making a quick-and-dirty profile, it's great cause you don't 
need special targets (as you do to auto-read in the DTP-41).

- If you are going to compare instruments, you have to compare how many 
bands they read. The more bands they break the spectrum down to the more 
accurate they are likely to be. Also, the software they come with will make a 
big difference in use. I only have X-Rite instruments and cannot compare to 
anything else. But I would want to make sure that if you are paying 
significantly less for the same features, you are not giving up something 
important either by way of tech sup. or accuracy. X-Rite and Macbeth have 
been standards in the industry for a long time. 

- Regarding profiling software, I guess since you are using this for mono / 
quad you only have one choice. But if you (also) do color, there are a lot of 
companies with similar claims out there,  hovering in the 3-5+ K dollars. I don't 
know how much of those claims they deliver. I have the Lino and Praxisoft 
products, but Monaco claims superiority, ColorBlind used to rule.... who 
knows. I don't know anyone who has bought _everything_ and done side by 
side profiles. I tend to use Lino for CMYK and CompassProfile for RGB, but I 
am not ready to recommend them over the current offerings. This is a pretty 
nasty area to compare and determine who has the best value for money. 
Tread carefully, the waters are deep is all I am saying. 

Even question if you need all this instrumentation for bw. I would put that 
money into a good RIP instead and get control of the individual channels - but 
I haven't done it (with Epsons) and don't have specific recommendations like 
Dan and others here. Just wanted to put in a word of caution before the 
Absolute kicks in....

Antonis

.

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Martin Wesley" 
<mwesley250@e...> wrote:
> Scott,
> 
> Thanks for the feedback. This is definately a field where few of us 
> have much experience.
> 
> So I gather the inaccuracy with the Spectrocam occur when you are 
> using it in their fixture and moving it over a test strip but if you 
> do the patches individually they are okay?
> 
> Tyler is on his third or fourth one due to defects and recalls so I 
> am concerned about their quality control.
> 
> I seem to recall in the Colormouse specs that it required 4 sec for 
> each measurement which would slow you down, manually or 
> automatically, on even the 127 patch test. What is the measurement 
> time for the Spectrocam?