Digital BW, The Print

Mitch,

I agree that ImagePrint 5.6 is easy to install. My problem is that it simply
doesn't work properly after it is installed! Having read such glowing
tributes to this program on this list, I thought I had better try it with my
2100 (2200 in USA). So I obtained a demo disk and installed it - no problem.
But after two days of trying to get it to print a B&W grayscale image, I
have one print that is a complete reversal - i.e. a negative - and I've had
to reboot the computer more times than I used to with Win 3.1 in several
years. With Win XP Pro I had almost forgotten what rebooting was - until I
ran this program. It is mindboggling that they haven't yet got round
(version 5.6!!) to combining the different bits that are installed into one
program that works. Why should I have to run a separate program IpInstall to
install a printer, IpManage to change this, and SpoolFace to try and get rid
of the files that it won't print. Despite reading the full manual, your
instructions, and some other instructions, and trying installing the printer
to a specific port, or piggy-backing it off the existing Epson driver, it
still doesn't work. It usually says it can't get the machine identification.
Well, if it can't, somebody better write a program that can! What then
happens is that it totally locks up, I can't cancel the file in Spoolface,
and the FAQ's say that if this happens, you have to reboot or go into Task
Manager and find a process called IpBatch and end it!!!  Ok, I can do that,
but I shouldn't have to if the program was written properly. Goodness me, I
wrote simple programs for handling our office database files 20 yrs ago, and
the first thing I had to learn was how to catch all the stupid and
not-so-stupid things that could go wrong, and redirect them to stop the
program crashing or locking up.

So, although having B&W prints without metamerism due to the yellow ink
sounds great, I have gone back to the totally reliable driver Epson has
provided and to my own custom profile which is pretty good for B&W if made
on the Photorealistic setting (NOT the NCA setting, which does not give very
good neutrals).

If Colorbyte finish the program one day, I might try it again, but no way
would I spend \ufffd460 on the current Lite version (Do people really pay
thousands of dollars for the complete (?) version?). If Microsoft produced a
program like this, everyone would be slating them right, left, and centre.
But because it isn't Microsoft, you all seem to put up with these ridiculous
problems and work out ways round them, while writing glowing tributes to the
program. Perhaps it does work out-of-the-box for some people, but for that
money it has got to work out-of-the-box for everyone (or almost). It clearly
doesn't, as one can see from just reading the FAQ's, and it is not as though
we are talking about something as complex as OSX or WinXP - we're simply
talking about a printer driver!!

This is clearly the most poorly-behaved program that I have ever used, and
in 20 or more years I've tried a lot. I'm not saying that the results are
bad if you can get it to work; they may be good, but the programmers have to
make it work first before they can demonstrate it.

Bob Frost (in a very bad mood)

----- Original Message ----- 

From: "Mitch Alland" <malland@...>
>
> >  As for installing Imageprint, you really have
> > to know what you are doing. If you make one mistake it will not work.
> > Most people are not that experienced with installing software and it
> > can be a problem. I would not make light of this issue because I had
> > a so called expert insatll Imageprint with my 2200 printer and I
> > would have never been able to do this myself. Even with the expert
> > doing the instalation there were problems that had to be corrected. I
> > am sure that an experienced person will have no trouble but most
> > people will need halp.
>
> I simply don't agree with you that IP is difficult to install. The
> process is explained well and simply in the IP QuickStart Manual.