Can the Pro9000 Mark II do blue?

[tony22]

I ask because I am quite surprised by what I'm seeing. I'm using Epson Photo Paper and tried a couple of supplied profiles, but more importantly a profile I created myself with my Spyder3Print SR. In all cases normal photos - random content with a range of tones - look fine. Certainly they look the best with my own profile. A very good match with my calibrated Sony GDM900 CRT display. So I just tried printing a RGBCMYK patch pattern and discovered to my surprise that the P9000.2 is not producing anything close to true blue. The patch looks and reads RGB 0,0,255 on my display but looks positively purple printed out. I'm really quite confused since images I printed out with broad blue sky tones look fine.

Can anyone else contribute their experience with the Pro9000 and pure blue?

The other patches, BTW, look dead on. As soon as the print has stablized over 24 hours I intend to read the colors with my spectro.

 

[Grandad35]

I don't have a Pro9000, but my i9900 is similar in that it also uses 8 inks. Here is a screen capture of a blue area (foreground) and it's proof (background) using my profile for Kirkland paper and Formulabs ink for that printer. Clearly, my printer can't print a deep, pure blue because the inks can't get you there. That's why some printers include a separate blue ink - to reach into that corner or the color spectrum. BTW, my monitor also can't get there - both of these colors give me a gamut warning for my calibrated monitor.

Blue skies aren't normally a problem because they aren't a deep, pure blue and are nicely printed with a mixture of cyan and magenta (no yellow).

 

[tony22]

Here's mine. The purpley image is as it appears in Photoshop Soft Proof, which looks very much like the printed color. This is with a profile created from the 729 patch targets in Spyder3Print SR. The samples were all checked to insure they were properly captured before creating the profile. Just to check I made another profile with the 225 patch target and the results are similar. All the usual checks were done - making sure printer ICM was off for printing the targets, making sure it's also off when used from Photoshop and letting PS manage colors, etc.

I did clean the white calibration target for the spectro before calibrating it and using it for the 225 patch profile. Used isopropyl aclcohol which was recemmended by users and reviewers.

Other colors in print look just about right. My monitor is a Sony GDM-FW900, calibrated, and as accurate as you can get.

Hmm, your RGB is 2, 68, 175 and mine is 56, 69, 161. Apart from the red push they're actually quite close. I wonder why mine is so much redder than yours?

 

[mikling]

ha ha, profiling disease strikes again!

better stock up big time on paper as soon as you want perfection after getting a profiling package. Symptoms of the disease has hit already. Printing patches out a second or third time with the same settings. Then we try different settings and check again. Oh no, let's try another brand of paper.

Results are par for the course. Convince yourself by softproofing with some OEM ICC profiles. They might be better or not, depends really.

After a while, you get a sense that there is no perfect paper as well. Some allow the printer to perform better in certain areas and you use that paper when that color range is important.

When I was a newbie in hifi, I'd listen for certain aspects. Over time, you realize it is wrong. You'll never get everything right. It might get a bit more accurate in a certain aspect but that is not to say what was deficient was not actually better overall.

Now here's something to think about. If you look at the relative gamut of the Epson R1800 and Epson R1900, you'll see that the R1900 is superior. Now let's take a look at those inks inside the printer. What!!!! The R1900 does away with the blue pigment that the R1800 had but now sports an orange shade instead. Now what happens when you get those deep blues. Well, I happen to have both printers.

I have not thoroughly tested the R1900 yet but at this time there appears to be no detriment to its reproduction of blues as compared to the R1800 which used a dedicated blue pigment ink.

This seems to be the reason why the 1900 can do what it does with a single medium shade of cyan.

http://www.printerville.net/2008/02/21/more-on-epsons-radiance-color-matching/

 

[pharmacist]

You might get a more perceptual acceptable "blue" by means of profile preshifting. I strongly recommends this method to get a much better blue to the naked eye than the purplish blue you get by using the standard targets you used to print. Sometimes even dark blue skies get purplish (the so-called blue to purple shift which is a known problem with the Spyder3print). By preshifting the hue in the blue channel with +10 points (hue/saturation channel) the blue patches get more purple. The Spyder3print software counters the more purplish reading by compensating this with more blue, so the target you will get in the end will become much much more pleasing to the naked eye and your purple will seem to become much more perceptual blue. You will get a "blue" similar to the canned profiles provided by Epson. This is the ultimate solution to your problem.

 

[tony22]

Mikling, don't talk to me about the profiling disease and hi-fi! Even back when I had an Epson 1200 I spent untold reams of paper trying to get a perfect result. I gave up and wasn't satisfied. In the case of this Pro9000 I've gotten close (I'll explain in a bit), and with Pharmacist's interesting option I may be satisfied.

As to hi-fi, I've been a so called audiophile for going on 30-some years now. I got myself calibrated pretty quickly as I go to many acoustic live performances every year. I stopped seeking perfection there a long time ago . My audio system meets my needs so I can simply enjoy what I hear.

Well, I've tweaked the original profile so that now a DE2K for a Soft Proofed gray of 37,0,0 (as sampled in Photoshop) went from 3.818 with the original S3P profile to 1.096. That's good enough for me - and it looks like what I'm seeing on screen! ...except for those blues. So Pharmacist, if I understand what you're suggesting, I would do this additional preshifting not in tweaking the profile any further, but from within Photoshop? I would open up Hue/Saturation, select the Blue Channel, and then push it toward purple by about 10 points. Should I use the test print as a visual indicator of how much to preshift? I just tried that, and if I do it that way it looks like I should really push it to +20. Want to make sure I understand this before trying it on real paper.

 

[The Hat]

When I used an Epson printer I could achieve pretty good deep blues (not what I wanted) but found when I used a Canon printer to print the same sheet the colour was always different no matter which way I profiled it.
In Commercial 4 colour printing one could never produce a good blue without adding an extra spot colour to it, this problem doesnt just apply to inkjet printers.
The best way to achieve the blue that you require is to print your sheet twice (two passes) but a lot of tinkering (profiling) will be required.. :|

 

[pharmacist]

Preshifting the original target to cope with the purplish hue in dark blues:

-Open your target file in Photoshop or equivalent program (I presume you use the "High Quality Target Plus Grays 1 of 2.tif").
-choose at the menu: Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation

-from the Hue/Saturation window: select from the second drop down menu (master) Blues
-Now increase the amount for Hue with +10 units (Do not use more, since artifacts in some gradients can be obvious)

-Click ok and now save this image. You might want to keep a original version of this file.

Now print this file on the paper you want to profile (remember: disable color management both in Photoshop as in your printer driver).

Take your Spider Printer spectophotometer and read the target, after having the printed target properly dried (for pigment: 24 hours) and create your profile.

Now with this new profile take a look by printing the same file which gives your that horrible purplish hue over your skies. Use redendering intent: relative colorimetric or if softproofing is giving you a lot of grayed out area's (out of gamut colors) choose the perceptual or even the saturation intent.

For papers containing optical brightening agents (OBA's) I uncheck the absolute grey in the advanced options.

 

[tony22]

Ah, now I understand. Would you happen to know if Epson Photo Paper uses OBAs?

 

[pharmacist]

yes they do, so uncheck the absolute grey option.

Take note you choose the BLUES channel only, so not the master or all colours are affected. The problem is in the blues, so you only want to modify the hue in the blues.