Digital BW, The Print

In a message dated 9/26/06 4:30:51 AM, wcosshall@... writes:


> 
> HP has announced the new Z printers. The big feature is a built-in 
> spectro-photometer so
> you can profile any paper yourself.
> 

That was interesting to play with. HP has done a good job, and the printers 
profile papers, even third party papers, very well. When I did side by side 
prints from the HP-built profile, and a PrintFIX PRO 2.0 profile, either in color 
or black and white, they were very close (both on HP, and third party media). 
When it came to choosing between them the universal decision was for the PFP2 
profile (even by HP reps, much to their chagrin, when they checked which was 
which on the back), but I was quite impressed. This certainly beats canned 
profiles, and can cover third party papers as well. Anyone satisfied with canned 
profiles before will definately be satisfied with this solution, plus some who 
weren't.

I was slower to grasp the limitations than the quality. I'm used to be being 
able to adjust profiles as desired, and there is no facility for any type of 
adjustment with these machine profiles, so thats one factor. For B&W its a much 
bigger factor; what the HP color scientists think is the right blend to paper 
white will be fine for graphic design work, but it won't necessarily cut it 
for fine art prints. Another factor is that you get just one flavor of profile. 
I'm getting quite used to building a range of PrintFIX PRO 2.0 profiles from 
one measurement set for B&W work. 

Beyond that, is the "built in spectro" concept in general. Many of the 
studios I visit have a drawer filled with orphan proprietary monitor calibrators 
left over from long-dead monitors. Even the ones that still have the monitor, and 
use the proprietary calibrator for it, also own a Spyder to calibrate their 
other monitors so that they all match. Its a bit like that here: if you buy 
three Z-series printers, you are buying 3 spectros, which is fine for the 
convenience factor, but it doesn't work the other way; you will still want to profile 
other printers so all your prints are correct, and similar; and heaven forbid 
you have multiple Z printers, and feel that one doesn't match another, as 
there's no adjustability for that.

The "profile in the printer" idea is very good for color lasers and other 
network printers. Its a bit less applicable for wideformat printers, but can 
still be useful here. I suspect we'll get more comfortable with it over time. The 
Z drivers in general are quite easy to use, and let you know when the printer 
is not going to print, even if they don't always correctly tell you why, so 
thats all a step forward.

In terms of profiling the Z printers with PrintFIX PRO:

I sent back the Z2100 printer HP provided, as I didn't want to be comparing 
prints from a machine with a single gray ink (thus color-based blends for light 
grays), to those from Epson K3 and Canon iPF printers with two grays, so I 
have limited comments on the Z2100: I think that its more mature, at the moment 
than the color seperation for the Z3100, with a deeper black and smoother 
gradiations to white in low gamut color ramps. Thats about all I can say on the 
Z2100. 

The X3100 HP provided instead proved a bit harder to profile than the Epson 
and Canon two-gray printers. Fine for color, but a bit more challenging for B&
W. The low gamut color ramps tend to get quite saturated, especially in 
Magenta, before blending to white. This meant that I needed to adjust gray ramp 
blends to paper white for optimal results, which is not the case with the other 
brands. Not a big deal once I figured out how to do it, and it may well change by 
the time the 12 ink printers are released. For color it was good, offering 
the type of gamut I would expect for 11 or 12 colors.   

The Z3100 (keep in mind it was a prerelease unit) was painfully slow on 
startup (I didn't time it but I swear it took a quarter of an hour before it was 
ready to print, and with show attendees pushing buttons like monkeys all day 
long, restarting it when it had been shut down by accident was agonizing). It 
also is very slow rasterizing a narrow print on a wide roll. I think we'll have 
to rework the PFP letter/A4 optimized targets for this machine, no one wants to 
wait ten minutes for an image that small to RIP before printing. Overall, 
these issues are less annoying than quirks in competing machines (Epson ink 
changes, Canon driver issues), and might improve further before release.

C. David Tobie
Product Technology Manager
ColorVision Business Unit
Datacolor Inc.
CDTobie@...
www.colorvision.com


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