Bad Colors....Tale of two Epson printers..or drivers or ??????

mikling

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Ok, so from my past experience I know that the print engine for Epson R260 to the Artisan 50 and Epson Stylus Photo 1400 are the same......all the way to the Artisan 1430.

So I made profiles using the Artisan 50, until I brought home an Epson Stylus Photo 1400 from one of my relatives, it needed some attention.

So I started printing something using my profiles and coincidentally opened a new box of Kirkland.......Colors are way off!!!! What the hell. Paper Batch?????? or what? Tried some red river and same thing.

Brought my resting Artisan 50 and the colors are way off too! The differences were totally different.

I could get a decent image using the Artisan 50 using automatic setting BUT as soon as I tried turning off the color adjustment....things went weird for the Artisan 50. I could not get a decent print off the Artisan. Self doubt set in now. Did I put in the wrong ink in the 50? Did I put in M where I should have put in LM??????

So none of the two printers were printing correctly. What was going on? Were the profiles made with incorrect inks? What's happening.

So to determine what is going on, I used Qimage and printed side by side images using different Epson ICCs and sure enough the output is identical between the iccs of the Art50, SP1400 and Art1430.

Three hours passed of futzing around and telling myself, I had to redo the profiles. Rats.....more days of work. BUT which printer to use? They both are producing different images where they should be the same. What the hell???? How do you know which is the correct one????

Ran into my archives and pulled out past test prints. They did not look the same. That confirmed the ink is incorrect? or does it?

So what's happening? I started to switch carts between the two printers. Still both came out different.
It simply made no sense.

So I stepped back and wondered what the difference was? It did not dawn on me what the possibility was. So I removed the artisan 50 driver and reinstalled it. No difference.....until I downloaded a NEW driver and bang the Artisan 50 came back to where it should have been. Was the privious driver WRONG? it certainly looked like double profiling was going on.Even when I turned off color adjustment.

The Epson profiles and mine were now much closer....the way it should have been.

In retrospect....the Artisan driver used to create the profiles were done two drivers before. I installed an SSD and resinstalled a new driver.... DId the newest driver fix something? I don't know.

From this I then surmised that the SP1400 was now the one incorrect. Is it the printer itself or is it the driver?........Time will tell when more work is done BUT when someone has "bad" color. it is not always easy to figure out what is happening. I mean I have color managed thousands of times. I could not have been making the same mistake for over 4 hours. So something was amiss. Exactly what??? I am not sure and it still remains a bit of a mystery. What should have been a straightforward thing consumed hours of time. I could easily imagine someone not as experienced, throwing the printer out the window.
 

Harvey

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@mikling the problem you described is easily solved with a fresh install of Windows. A friend of mine told me about the same situation, at first I didn´t believe him, but he was quite confident that in some months somehow his prints were not good, and not using color management at all, just OEM profiles. Printer drivers changed and no uninstall/install solved the problem.
 

Ink stained Fingers

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Reinstalling Windows would be the very last resort for me. The question would be where else - outside the driver with its OEM profiles - could be something impacting the rendering of colors. You may look to printers - properties - color management - where you in Windows can assign profiles to a device. That is not a very convenient place but some software - updates whatever - may have changed inadvertently the settings there. It may help as well to test the same printer on another computer and if colors are different to identify relevant differences.
 

Emulator

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Some of @mikling 's problems seem very similar to my own in the update of Elements 13 to 13.1. By reverting back to Elements 8, I can now switch off colour management and run Argyll to create new profiles, but there remains a problem of unexplained colour shifts in existing profiles.

It had not occurred to me until I read @mikling's comments that there may be a secondary coincidental problem. Has there been, by any chance, a Windows update, among the many we seem to receive automatically each month, that has upset the colour management? Has anyone else experienced unexplained colour management problems?
 

Smile

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Well the ICC profile describes the inner workings of (is a recipe for):

Printer (including firmware number)
Ink (including steady ink supply)
Paper (including relative air humidity)
Printer Driver and it's settings, driver version etc.
Printing application (and it's version)
OS (and any updates you a have)

If you change any one component via updates you may need to re-create ICC profile. Now replace the word "printer" with "monitor, scanner, digital camera" and you get the idea.
 
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