You don't need much patches to create a good printer profile

[pharmacist]

Inspired by @Ink stained Fingers I generated a small 165 patch target that can be printed on a small 10x15 cm/4x6 inch photo card and with some modifying the grey and near neutral patches in the patch editor in i1Profiler to obtain an optimum patch distribution in the RGB color space I could generate a very good printer profile with only 165 patches:

Above a printer screen in gamut view (i1Profiler) between the 165 patch target (blue) and the 581 patch target (orange). They are practically the same in volume size and almost identical.

Actually the target is even better than the 50 + 50 method of the Colormunki: the ccStudion/i1Studio method uses a interpolation method between 2 points in the color space not taking care about the intermediate points if the behaviour is not linear (curved behaviour), which gives some problem like in the example below between the 165 patch target (i1profiler but I generated a v2 version so iccview.de could handle it) and the Colormunki profile:

You can see clearly the wired cube in the green/blue/yellow area of the color cube (165 patch target with i1profiler) can cover a significantl area that is not covered by the 50+50 Colormunki profile (the colored cube). I had this problem in the past on my P800 using a chinese pigment refill ink with a particular light cyan version that was way too light causing a strange gradient in the blue skies, that I could only deal with using the ArgyllCMS method (480 patches), before I could hold on the i1Pro2 spectro.. Note this profile is for the ET-8550 using original ink, so if you use the Colormunki method to create the profile: please take: probably you need an optimization scan with some green/blue colors to improve that area. The simple 165 patch i1Profiler profile does immediately a good job and is on pair with a larger 581 patch target.

You can download those 2 sets of files for the i1Profiler (i1pro2 and i1iO version included)

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

The simple 165 patch i1Profiler profile does immediately a good job and is on pair with a larger 581 patch target.

I only can confirm @pharmacist 's findings above with a test I did on his previous patch sheet version with 154 patches - this shows that a pretty good profile is possible with such a low patch count.

 

[pharmacist]

I was wondering if this can be done too with ArgyllCMS. I will make a target for ArgyllCMS also using 165 patches on 10x15 cm photo card.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I was wondering if this can be done too with ArgyllCMS

You may try to compare prints done either with an ArgyllCMS profile or an i1Profiler or ColorMunki or .... profile generator, but be aware that every company has some room for variations how rendering intents are implemented - it would be the perceptuakl or the relative colorimetric mode affected mainly. So differences in print output will most likely appear but you cannot judge which version is better or more correct , just look how many adjustment options there are for profile generation with the i1Profiler package.
But you may try to do such comparison with ArgyllCMS profiles gnerated from a low or high patch count and print the same patch sheet with these different profiles and scan those prints. I don't know which math tools you may have to compare that data e.g. in a spreadsheet.

Give it a try to fit the 165 patches onto a 10x15 cm card for ArgyllCMS