Digital BW, The Print

The Canon iPF5000 printer has an interesting bug in the driver. If you define 
a set of settings at the driver level, then load a sheet of paper, choose the 
correct media setting and size (you must do this at both ends, driver and 
printer, and woe be to the one who does not get them all exactly right!), you 
must them go from the default "copies and pages" screen, to the "main" screen 
before hitting print, or else your (correctly selected) media type will not be 
used, the printer will show a "wrong paper type" warning while printing, and 
colors in your print will not be correct. You don't have to actually reselect 
your paper type to have it print correctly, you simply need to open the screen 
where it shows before pushing the print button. 

Given all the other distractions when printing on sheets of fine art paper 
with the iPF5000 (long waits before loading sheets, after prints complete, 
frequent rejection of a loaded sheet, settings required at both ends each time, 
etc. If you choose to print ten copies, you must load each sheet one at a time, 
and choose paper type and media size for every single one of them. Out of ten 
prints, you should plan on at least five or six sheet loading failures as well) 
many users may have missed this bug. Since I am printing black and white 
images, which are very sensitive to media setting, it shows up quite clearly: fail 
to open the "main" window, get an incorrect print, even though you have the 
right media setting defined twice: once at the printer, once in the driver 
preset. Haven't tested to see if this situation occurs under Windows. 

The Direct Export Module for the iPF5000 may not suffer from the bug noted 
above, but it has a bug of its own: you can only get proper density in prints if 
you use a custom ICC profile. If you choose the default color or black and 
white settings, the prints are significantly light (about as much as a gamma 2.2 
> gamma 1.8 mismatch, interestingly enough). Also worth note with the export 
module: you can print grayscale output, but only from RGB files; grayscale 
files are not accepted. Since I'm printing to PrintFIX PRO 2.0 ICC profiles 
designed for grayscale or tinted grayscale printing from either grayscale or RGB 
files, this works fine for me, but it would seem to eliminate most other 
grayscale printing, if accuracy is at all a factor.

This printer offers excellent black and white prints, once you get that 
far...

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


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