Thursday, October 20, 2005

DTP70 progress notes

Today I set up the appointment for the GMB PMP comparison I want to do with the DTP70. We're going to do some CMYK with a BestColor RIP as well, on some real wide-format printers, we have a whole menagerie of them available !

And I profiled another paper,on my mini-wide-format Epson, which I call super-Tetenal. This is a 290g superglossy ceramic inkjet paper which I often use to make 13x18 prints. Give me some leeway, I'm using this page to dump my rough notes.

I haven't yet quite sorted out the paper feed of the DTP70. It rejected my A4 supertetenal sheets until I scissored off the leading margin up to the dotted line. Maybe I'll go in and edit the margin away in Photoshop and see whether matters improve.

Anyway, total time to get a profile is under 10 minutes: 2 minutes max to feed and read, 5 minutes to calculate on the Powerbook. Maybe it's time to move Profiler to the G5 - code name Fanjet- and let it earn its name.

I'm not totally happy with the profile quality today. The red patch, again, and surprisingly the foliage green. Strangely, the two sets of prints I have, matte and superglossy, these match quite well, they even match the Powerbook screen, but not the Colorchecker. However my PocketChecker (tm) matches the big new colorchecker. I'm going to hand-measure the colorchecker tomorrow and reprint. By now the installation phase should be considered over; it's time to go for results.

Today I had an epiphany: Black detail is much better on the matte than on the glossy. Hmmm. Maybe there is a reason why people print B&W on matte. It's not because it looks prettier, I always thought that was a convention, it's because the deeper blacks actually allow us to carve more detail into the dark tones.

As you can see, I have no problem showing how dumb I am on my blog - feel free to comment if you see something worth correcting !

Oh, and yes, the DTP-70 really makes profiling immediately before you print perfectly feasible. Maybe in a few years they'll bring out a really cheap model and everybody will have push-button profiling. The EyeOne is not something I use casually in the same way.

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