ImagePrint experiences
2003-09-19 by crown_red
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.