Digital BW, The Print

This is from an experienced, but amateur, wet darkroom B&W 
photographer, also a retired professional computer programmer and 
technology manager. It is intended for other digital newbies. 

I made the jump to digital three weeks ago by buying an Epson 2200 
printer, an Epson 3200 scanner, and a Canon G5 camera. In the 
previous year I think I read most of the pertinent magazine articles, 
BBS postings, and web sites on the subject. I thought I was ready. I 
was wrong. I was especially attracted to articles that said, "…
knocked my socks off." Now I think there are many out there who wear 
very loose socks.

For these three weeks I've been chasing the elusive goal of monitor 
and printer calibration, profiling, and gray balancing for primarily 
B&W and a little color work. I've used the Epson canned profiles and 
about 6 other "custom" and canned profiles. I spent a couple days 
with the Epson Gray Balancer. I bought, tried, and returned Monaco EZ 
Color. A friend generated some profiles for me using Colorvision's 
PrintFix. I've tweaked, I've curved, but I've kept my socks on. The 
Epson Gray Balancer gave the best B&W prints. The Epson canned 
profiles worked better than Monaco, Colorvision, and all the others.

Then I bought ImagePrint (V5.6 Lite) for the inflated price of $495 
plus a ridiculous $30 for shipping. Bottom line – all problems 
solved. I'm finally producing quality useable prints. They are a 
reasonable match to my monitor. I've got one sock off, one sock still 
on. With ImagePrint RIP I can truly produce good quality prints in 
both color and B&W, on a wide variety of papers, on the same printer 
with the same inks.

So I guess this is another endorsement for ImagePrint. If I had 
started with it, I would have saved about 40 hours of testing other 
solutions and about $150 worth of ink, paper, shipping, and 
restocking fees. However, the endorsement comes with some caveats.

Caveat 1: The price seems exorbitant, because it is. Yet it's not too 
hard to rationalize. You can buy "custom" profiles, but you would 
spend $300 to $400 for just a few paper/ink combinations which don't 
work as well. You can buy low end, flatbed scanner based profiling 
systems for $200 to $300 and spend hours generating your own custom 
profiles which are likely to give poor results (Monaco EZColor). You 
can buy high end, spectrometer based profiling systems for $1,500 or 
more. With all these "profiling" systems, you are still left using 
the Photoshop/Epson driver combination, and there is the rub. 
Photoshop makes great editing software. Epson makes great hardware. 
Neither put much effort into their printing software, and it shows.

Of course you can go the Piezo or Septone route, spending well over 
$500 for a dedicated B&W printer and still have the color problem to 
solve. Or you can just live with the results that Epson and Photoshop 
gives you out of the box and try to convince people that magenta cast 
and yellow skin tones are features, not faults.


The company, ColorByte Software in Tampa, Florida, is not one I would 
put in the "user friendly" category. 

They are the most paranoid I've seen about software piracy. It 
appears that their main customer is the professional photographer or 
printer, and that they have no idea how to approach the mass consumer 
market. I would guess that their professional customers try to buy 
one copy of the software and then run it on multiple systems. They 
use a hardware "dongle" AND an encryption serial code on top of the 
dongle. I ordered via e-mail, but then had to play voice phone tag 
because they required both e-mail and voice confirmation of my credit 
card. 

Their support is among the weakest in the industry. Read their web 
site support policy, which when combined with their software 
protection sends a message that they think their customers are all 
thieves who will eat up all their profits with annoying support 
calls. In 5 phone calls I made to buy and install, they never 
answered the phone. Instead, they returned my calls with 1 to 2 
hours, which may be good because they don't have a toll-free number.

During installation on Windows XP, Microsoft interrupted the process 
with a warning message that said the software is not "Logo 
Compliant." That Microsoft message "strongly" recommends that you 
abort the installation and contact the manufacturer because 
continuing "may do severe harm to your system." I had to call 
Colorbyte, leave a message, and wait 1.5 hours for a return call. 
Colorbyte first tried to disclaim responsibility because the message 
is caused by the dongle driver installation, which they did not 
write. But they said that it's OK to continue the installation. Then 
they said that in order to get Microsoft "Logo Compliance," software 
vendors have to submit their products to Microsoft and pay a fee for 
testing. Apparently ColorByte and their dongle supplier did not want 
to be bothered with that. If you install ImagePrint on Windows XP you 
are guaranteed to get this terrorizing Microsoft message. Yet there 
is no mention of it in any of the ImagePrint documentation, nor on 
their web site support pages.

The ImagePrint software also installs something called muxd.exe which 
tries to be a "server." If you have a decent firewall installed it 
will trap muxd.exe and give you a warning. It turns out that muxd.exe 
is for networked printer support. There is also no mention of it in 
the documentation or web site support pages. But there it is, running 
all the time and using up 1 Meg of memory whether you need it or not.

ImagePrint uses 225 megabytes of disk storage because it installs 
every component for every known printer. The typical user probably 
needs about a third of the stuff that gets installed.

In operation, the software is fast and efficient. But the user 
interface is about grade "C". Not as confusing as the infamous 
Photoshop vs. Epson print controls, but close. You have to look in 
three or more different places to make the common settings required 
for each print job. Some are pull-down menus, some are right-click 
pop-up menus. The option labels are "techie" versus user oriented. 
For example, you define the image's input working space under a tap 
labeled "Bitmap," and the output profile name is selected under a tab 
labeled "System."

Conclusion: I'm glad I bought ImagePrint. I'll keep it. I'll feel bad 
a year from now when new hardware, software, or marketing 
developments give the same performance for half the price.