Digital BW, The Print

I saw today in that fine journal of contemporary truth about the 
photography industry, American Photo, an ad for Epson. This 
may have been out for some time, but I assume that they've 
developed their own consumer color-matching scheme called 
PIM (Print Imaging Matching); it seems directly mostly at getting 
digital cameras and consumer printers calibrated together. 

They list many different brands of digital cameras, mostly point 
and shoot, and then several Epson printers, but they also 
include the 1280 in it.

Was Apple's ColorSync too hard to understand for the average 
person? (I've always thought so myself).

Mark,  According to the latest MacAddict review of the Photo 785EPX:

 "Epson's new Print Image Matching (PIM) technology is designed to make an
end-run around the limitations of sRGB. A PIM enabled digital camera embeds
info about its native color capture abilities in the header of every picture
it takes. A PIM enabled printer can decode that info, which it uses to
restore descarded colors (printers that aren't PIM enabled simply ignore the
info). PIM can also improve print quality by encoding other image
properties, such as sharpening and contrast."

Being as how I understand this technology to be geared toward direct
printing from a digital camera without a computer I don't think it will
effect colorsync or that it is a color matching scheme.


Carolyn

> 
> I saw today in that fine journal of contemporary truth about the
> photography industry, American Photo, an ad for Epson. This
> may have been out for some time, but I assume that they've
> developed their own consumer color-matching scheme called
> PIM (Print Imaging Matching); it seems directly mostly at getting
> digital cameras and consumer printers calibrated together.
> 
> They list many different brands of digital cameras, mostly point
> and shoot, and then several Epson printers, but they also
> include the 1280 in it.
> 
> Was Apple's ColorSync too hard to understand for the average
> person? (I've always thought so myself).

on 10/13/01 4:44 PM, Carolyn  Frayn at carolyn@... wrote:

> Being as how I understand this technology to be geared toward direct
> printing from a digital camera without a computer I don't think it will
> effect colorsync or that it is a color matching scheme.

not only that but Epson's handling of color spaces in the Epson inkjet
driver is not merely incorrect but completely impenetrable. The drop-down
settings DON'T do what they claim: what they actually DO is anyone's guess.

and am I the only one who is furious epson have not bothered to support OS X
on the Mac by writing drivers? Beyond incomprehensible to me.

Epson's hardware is great. Their software bites.

-- 
John Brownlow

http://www.pinkheadedbug.com

on 10 13 2001 6:46 PM Johnny Deadman wrote:

> not only that but Epson's handling of color spaces in the Epson inkjet
> driver is not merely incorrect but completely impenetrable. The drop-down
> settings DON'T do what they claim: what they actually DO is anyone's guess.

What part of the driver? The whole or is it just the colorsync area that
gives you grief?  I don't use the colorsync drop down as I've never achieved
good results from that.  I find the "print space and rendering intent
without color adjustment" to be a great improvement over the old "printer
management" nonsense.

> and am I the only one who is furious epson have not bothered to support OS X
> on the Mac by writing drivers? Beyond incomprehensible to me.
> 
> Epson's hardware is great. Their software bites.

I don't use OS X yet, I'll get it with the G5 and I'm in no hurry to buy it
special ... I do agree that it is beyond incomprehensible they have not
written drivers for it given that the Mac/Epson user base is not a wee
group.

Carolyn

John,

>and am I the only one who is furious epson have not bothered to support OS X
>on the Mac by writing drivers? Beyond incomprehensible to me.

I believe they have come out with drivers for several of the more recent 
printers but those of us using older printers like the 1200/1160 etc. are 
probably out of luck. I doubt they'll do the necessary work to produce 
drivers for out of production printers. On the other hand I'm not jumping 
on the OSX bandwagon just yet though I've played with it on my new iBook. 
Pretty to look at but the Unix underpinnings will take some getting used 
to for folks who like messing around under the hood of the classic Mac 
OS. If/when I get seriously into OSX (Photoshop version appears, etc.) I 
might keep an older OS Mac as a print server.

Cheers,

Nina