Epson ET-8550 Velvet Fine Art Paper settings uses Pigment and Dye Black

[thebestcpu]

I won't get a VFA sample sheet for a test but I have a sample pack on order with various Hahnemühle cotton type papers on order and will do what we recommendet above - testing with different driver settings.

https://www.fine-art-papiere.de/hahnemuehle-matt-fine-art-smooth-testpackung-din-a4.html

Hi @Ink stained Fingers
It will be great to see your results.
One thing that might be worth checking in your tests is the difference between the standard and the highest quality setting. The difference may not kick in until the highest quality level is chosen. We could DM if you want details behind that hunch.

John Wheeler

 

[Fried Chicken]

Jose Rodriguez now did some testing on some Canson Aquarelle paper and found significantly better black/shadow results. Not sure what that paper is:

Again it speaks to the problem with the printers/manufacturers defining how an ICC profile is implemented.

 

[Epatcola]

One thing that might be worth checking in your tests is the difference between the standard and the highest quality setting.

VFA mode only has one quality setting and it is slow. Maybe it is trying to be high resolution, maybe it is just trying to put down a lot of ink. Maybe it is putting dye black on top of pigment or the other way round. Who knows?

The Epson Ultra Glossy media setting is alone in having a similarly slow 'Best' quality option. Ultra Glossy Best and High settings do produce different profiles.

The Epson supplied profiles for all glossy and lustre papers are identical (which is not unreasonably assuming all the supported Epson glossy and lustre papers have the same coating).

I doubt there is any quality setting dependant secret sauce in the profiles - if there was how could they be used for soft proofing?

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I doubt there is any quality setting dependant secret sauce in the profiles - if there was how could they be used for soft proofing?

Epson profiles contain a private section with 60 kB - the last line in the tag table of an icc profile. The profile inspector does not open this section and does not display the embedded (hex) code as it does with the other tags. It honors the privacy of the data.

That's where Epson is most likely hiding paper specific parameters to let the driver make a pre-linearison before an internal or 3rd party profile is applied.

 

[Fried Chicken]

They did NOT call it "secret sauce"? No way.

 

[Epatcola]

Epson profiles contain a private section with 60 kB

If there is anything in that private section which adjusts printing according to printer driver setting then the profiles would be useless for soft proofing.

If there is anything significant in that section 3rd party generated profiles would lack it.

I removed the driver (windows) installed profiles and it prints fine and the same with a custom profile.

And finally colorthink is broken. That section is only 60 bytes and contains this:

"drvn......EPSON ET-8550...EPSON L8180...ET-8550..L8180."

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

The impact of quality levels onto the gamut size are small - the driver is most likely switching to a smaller ink droplet size so the printhead needs more passes to put the same amount of ink onto the paper .

Here is an example with a budget level glossy paper Action 210 , the gamut displayed with the quality settings standard - high - best for the ultraglossy selected in the driver.


The blue border line covers the gamut with the standard setting - red for high qluality - and yellow for best quality.
The differences are small and even smaller more most of the luminance range, it's just at the dark end at the bottom of the gamut volumes that the red gamut - high quality - shows some more coverage than the blue gamut. But that's all not really exciting differences, and they may be a little bit smaller or wider with another paper - paper coating. The Ultraglossy driver just runs with the dye black, the matte pigment black would not adhere to the surface - you can wipe it off. Pigment black inks only adhere to matte - plain paper like coatings.



Let me now compare the profiles with the VFA driver setting - blue - and the plain paper settings - quality high - red - and plain paper - best - this on the Brilliant matte paper. The driver this time prints with the matte black - with the VFA setting and the plain paper setting

These are the profiles at mid luminance L*=50




The gamut volumes are pretty similar, no gumut has an outstanding size

And this at the darker range




The gamuts are here rather similar again - with a slight benefit of the plain paper quality high setting.

When I look to all these plots the specifc VFA setting in the driver appears to me more like a convenience entry for the user than a driver with some secret and additional performance or functionality.