Printers...again!!!

[anonaboats]

Ok, I just reviewed most of the MANY printer-related entries on the forum. Wow, am I ever confused!! I've been using a aging HP 940c and want to "upgrade" to a new printer. What's the REAL deal between HP, Canon and Epson? One thread pushes me one way, the next another. I've been looking at the Epson R300 and the Canon i960. What would be the HP printer in this mix? $200-$300 for a printer is not the end of the world...but, somewhere I need to get the units compared in a "no bull/no salesperson" arena. I hope this Forum is it! Thanks for your patience in rehashing this topic one more time....Anona

[new girl on the bloc]

if you've been reading the forums then you probably have read my endorsement of the canon i960. it is very affordable and the photo quality is superb. having said this though, i have nothing to compare it to, such as the epson or the others. i did have an epson previously, just an inkjet printer, and was never happy with it, so got a canon this time. i just printed an 8.5x11 on watercolor paper and it is beautiful! looks like an old painting.

good luck. check steve's digicams for great reviews; perhaps that will tip the scales for you.

[stoneylonesome]

I too have just acquired the Canon i960, My third canon printer. I can't say enough about the quality of the prints. The real plus to the Canons is the individual ink tanks, when you run out of one color you just replace that one, you don't have to throw out the entire cartridge. big savings there because you will never run out of all the colors at the same time, and the tanks general run from $9 to $12 each.. Canon great printers.
:)

[Brumeister]

I also just bought the Canon i960 and I am truly impressed. Printed pictures are awesome and so far I have no negative comments to adhere to this post. :)

[Tategoi]

I've used Epson and Canon and now have a Canon i9100 which I think is the A3 version of the i950. I think it knocks spots off anything else in a desk top. It is utterley reliable and produces great results.

That said, great prints need more than a printer. Your screen really must be calibrated = 300% difference in quality.

Paper is the biggest difference, you pay for what you get and you get what you pay for. IMHO please don't expect any printer to perform well on low grade papers and ignore the advertising hype from most paper companies. it's a fallacy that you must use Epson paper with Epson printers and Canon papers with Canon printers - total tosh.

Sorry to say I think, again IMHO, that even Canon Pro paper leaves alot to be desired. There are specialist papers out there (Hahnemuhle for example) that will improve your prints another 300%. It's not cheap though.

A BIG plus on the Canon is it doesn't waste ink on start up or cleaning like some other famous printers I dare not mention.

Good luck.

p.s I just got an Epson 7600 and boy am i excited, never seen prints like it, truly amazing.

[stardis]

Interesting post. I have a Canon S820 and I thought that Canon Photo Paper Pro was the best, but I have always wanted to try some other brands and kinds of paper.

What would be a good brand(s) and specifically which paper of that brand(s) would be good for a novice photo printer to experiment with? I would like to use my S820 to its fullest capabilities. I would like to do more than print 4 X 6 borderless.

I have only used the "Pro" and "Plus" Canon papers and had excellent results with them. I have used the Kodak Premium paper and had good results with it after setting up the printer using Kodak's recommendations.

I use Photoshop Elements 2 and haven't tried calibrating the monitor.

[Tategoi]

The answer is a difficult one. You will have seen from various posters here the silly money you can get into.

My advise is to try to borrow a screen calibrator if you can, it does make a huge difference.

the good papers don't seem to be as widely advertised as the usual stuff but i have recently tried a paper from Imajet. It's 240gm paper so photo quality weight and produces superb results and is cheaper than Canon Pro and I think outperforms it by miles. They have recently got coating bang on and the ph of the paper is important. Try it and see is my advice

My favourite, outside of the stupidly expensive stuff, is from Hahnemuele called PhotoRag. On your printer the results would shock you. the depth of color has to be seen to be bel;ieved. you can read about specialist papers on http://www.on-linepaper.co.uk/acatalog/index.html and see if you want to try some.

good luck

[scottbergerphoto]

Using non-oem paper is tricky. Your printer driver is set up to use that brand of paper. When you select "premium glossy photo paper" you are selecting an ICC profile for that company's brand paper and ink. If you want to color manage your system(print exactly what you see on your monitor) you need to use profiles for your camera(built into FVU), your monitor (Adobe Gamma, Spyder, Gretag-Macbeth), and your printer. Some manufacturers of non-oem papers will provide ICC profiles for their paper but they don't reflect the kind of ink you might use. When you use Photoshop or Phoshop Elements 2.0 and go into Print Preview there is a place to tell the printer what printer ICC profile to use, OUTPUT. You then tell the printer driver "No color management". Epson provides ICC profiles for many of their printers with Epson paper and ink on their web site.
I use the Epson 2200 with Epson paper and ink, and the ICC profiles provided by Epson. My prints are identical to my monitor (Dell Trinitron).
For more information on "color management" do a search above.
Scott

[Tategoi]

Everyone agrees that colour profiling is a deep subject but we need to remember a very important fact - most of it is for images to be printed elsewhere (pre-press etc) - please not anyone get too overcomplicated by it if printing your own images on your own printer. Most of what you read you can forget.

Calibrate your monitor is number 1, without that you can forget it.

I really do not believe we have to use oem papers - it's all marketing tosh in my honest opinion. Ask any pro printer if he only uses Epson paper for an Epson machine and see what he says.

Again, in my humble opinion and experience, you can totally forget camera ICC profiles unless you are sending your images off like a photojournalist would. The whole idea of ICC profiles featuring in your entire workflow (camera/scanner - monitor - printer - paper) is for others to know exactly what type of colour your image is set in. If you go straight from your screen to your printer then a camera ICC profile is irrelevant, just the same as a scanner profile is if using a scanned image. It's this very thing that confuses amateurs and makes them end up totally ignoring the whole thing.

What can be really important, and where I agree in part with the last post is the ICC profile of the paper. There seem to be far more profiles written for Epson printers than Canon for some reason but extremly good results can be obtained by experimentation with papers without any ICC profile. If you stick to oem paper just because your printer window says 'Premium Glossy' or whatever then fine but you will miss out of alot.

The subject is huge and there is not enough space here to explain it fully but Adobe PS has a wonderful toy - VIEW, PROOF SETUP - to make life so easy for us. Learn even the basics of this side of PS and life changes forever so long as you have a calibrated monitor (sorry to drum it in).

The ideal world is to use a paper that you can get an ICC profile specific to your printer model for. Even then it's not foolproof because the perfect solution is custom profiles (expensive) written specifically for YOUR printer, the one you have on your desk.

Sorry to disagree with most of what you say Scott - life just 'aint that complicated to get really decent prints. I use an Epson 7600 complete with custom paper profiles written specifically for me and for a wide range of papers, Epson and otherwise, for my serious stuff. I also use a Canon i9100 desktop and get superb results with a huge range of papers, none of which have ICC profiles for.

With each new paper I try I do a few tests trying different profiles from the custom setup in VIEW, PROOF SETUP and with there being so many, one of them will do the job really well. I have to say my non oem paper prints outperform all of the oem papers for which there are ICC profiles built in.

Sorry to drag this out but I went through a solid year of hearthache to learn of these lessons. We have to remember that the colour preferences in PS are vital to get right and again, the subject is too much to explain further here. If anyone really does want some help I'll try my best if they e-mail me.

It really isn't that complicated for desktop printing of our own images and don't let the subject stop you from improving your prints tenfold, Epson, Canon or whatever.

[scottbergerphoto]

Tategoi wrote:
Everyone agrees that colour profiling is a deep subject but we need to remember a very important fact - most of it is for images to be printed elsewhere (pre-press etc) - please not anyone get too overcomplicated by it if printing your own images on your own printer. Most of what you read you can forget.

Calibrate your monitor is number 1, without that you can forget it.

I really do not believe we have to use oem papers - it's all marketing tosh in my honest opinion. Ask any pro printer if he only uses Epson paper for an Epson machine and see what he says.

Again, in my humble opinion and experience, you can totally forget camera ICC profiles unless you are sending your images off like a photojournalist would. The whole idea of ICC profiles featuring in your entire workflow (camera/scanner - monitor - printer - paper) is for others to know exactly what type of colour your image is set in. If you go straight from your screen to your printer then a camera ICC profile is irrelevant, just the same as a scanner profile is if using a scanned image. It's this very thing that confuses amateurs and makes them end up totally ignoring the whole thing.

What can be really important, and where I agree in part with the last post is the ICC profile of the paper. There seem to be far more profiles written for Epson printers than Canon for some reason but extremly good results can be obtained by experimentation with papers without any ICC profile. If you stick to oem paper just because your printer window says 'Premium Glossy' or whatever then fine but you will miss out of alot.

The subject is huge and there is not enough space here to explain it fully but Adobe PS has a wonderful toy - VIEW, PROOF SETUP - to make life so easy for us. Learn even the basics of this side of PS and life changes forever so long as you have a calibrated monitor (sorry to drum it in).

The ideal world is to use a paper that you can get an ICC profile specific to your printer model for. Even then it's not foolproof because the perfect solution is custom profiles (expensive) written specifically for YOUR printer, the one you have on your desk.

Sorry to disagree with most of what you say Scott - life just 'aint that complicated to get really decent prints. I use an Epson 7600 complete with custom paper profiles written specifically for me and for a wide range of papers, Epson and otherwise, for my serious stuff. I also use a Canon i9100 desktop and get superb results with a huge range of papers, none of which have ICC profiles for.

With each new paper I try I do a few tests trying different profiles from the custom setup in VIEW, PROOF SETUP and with there being so many, one of them will do the job really well. I have to say my non oem paper prints outperform all of the oem papers for which there are ICC profiles built in.

Sorry to drag this out but I went through a solid year of hearthache to learn of these lessons. We have to remember that the colour preferences in PS are vital to get right and again, the subject is too much to explain further here. If anyone really does want some help I'll try my best if they e-mail me.

It really isn't that complicated for desktop printing of our own images and don't let the subject stop you from improving your prints tenfold, Epson, Canon or whatever.
You coudn't be more wrong. This is especially important for people who edit and print at home!

1st, the whole process is really very easy to do.

2nd, if you shoot Raw, you must have an ICC profile to convert the image. Luckily, the camera profile is included in FVU, BreezeBrowser and C1LE, so that's no sweat.

3rd, It's very important to me that what I see on my monitor after I'm done editing, is what comes out on my printed page. Why buy an expensive printer, and use paper that's .50-1.00 a sheet if the picture doesn't look like what I've done in Photoshop? Why bother post processing?

Getting the print to look like the monitor even as you say camera to computer to printer, requires a monitor profile and a printer profile. Without those your just guessing.

It takes a whole 5-10 minutes to run Adobe Gamma and create a monitor profile if you don't want to bother with a hardware solution like Spyder.

It takes a whole 5-10 minutes more to copy the Epson printer profiles to the correct directory on my hard drive.

So, in under an hour I set my system up: monitor calibrated, printer profiled. You don't have to be particularly knowledgeable about color management to do it.

Your post gives the impression that it's just too hard, too complicated and not necessary. That's just plain wrong.

Two months ago, I didn't have a clue about setting up my system for color management. If you own a digital camera, a computer, and a good printer, there is no reason you shouldn't want to get the best prints you can at home. If Epson is going to be nice enough to give out free ICC profiles, it would be foolish to pass on it.
Scott

[new girl on the bloc]

so who can explain, in a couple of easy steps, how to do the basics to match what i see on my (laptop) screen to what i print out with my canon i960? i've messed with the adobe gamma, but am a bit confused about the whole process.

[John_T]

I guess you know that a laptop screen is not the best starting point? Otherwise the process is the same for any computer, but it is important and necessary to take the trouble to understand the basics of color management. If you don't, and I know how dedicated you are to the art of photograhpy, it's always going to be confusing. I'd suggest you go over and join this thread:

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=21370

[scottbergerphoto]

New Girl,
Monitor calibration is easier and more reliable on a CRT then LCD. But here goes:
1. Calibrate your LCD with Adobe Gamma or Colorvision Spyder with Optical or Photocal software. Save the profile you created as your default monitor profile. Then windows will automatically use that profile.
2. Download your pictures to your computer and if shooting Raw convert them to 8bitt(PSE2) or 16bitt(Photoshop) Tiff files, not JPEG. Tell the image converter to tag the file with the color space you shot it in sRGB or Adobe ( 1998 ).
2. In Photoshop or PSE2 you open up your image file and make sure it is tagged with whatever color space you took the picture in: sRGB or Adobe RGB ( 1998 ). Do your editing and then go to Print Preview in your application.
3. In Print Preview:
Source/input: srgb or Adobe (1998 ) same as above.
Output: This is the ICC Printer Profile I spoke about above. The Printer Profiles must be copied to the same folder your monitor profile is in. Some printers come with them for the manufacturers paper and ink. You may be able to find them on the printer manufacturer's web site. Select the one for the paper and printer you are using.
4. Select Print and go to the Printer Driver for your printer. Select the correct paper you are using. Then in the Advanced section, there are choices like: ICM, Photorealistic, sRGB, and No Color Management. Select No Color Management. Hit Print.
5. If you don't have printer profiles, don't select Source and Output in Print Preview. In the Printer Driver, select sRGB or ICM.
That is basically it.
For more information, do a search above on "color management".
Scott

[new girl on the bloc]

John and Scott - many thanks for your advice. I'll be reading and trying these steps and see what I can come up with.

And tis' true, right now I am feeling pretty confused by it all, but the images that I have printed so far, all except for one that I printed on Kodak Ultima (too dark), have come out looking great.

[stoneylonesome]

new girl on the bloc wrote:
John and Scott - many thanks for your advice. I'll be reading and trying these steps and see what I can come up with.

And tis' true, right now I am feeling pretty confused by it all, but the images that I have printed so far, all except for one that I printed on Kodak Ultima (too dark), have come out looking great.

And I thought I was the only one confused. My thing is and maybe I'm wrong, if it looks good to your eye and other people like it, than whatever you're doing is right. I have no problem with different papers even thou the results may very they in and of them selves can have a certain artistic appeal. I just wish Canon had a more water resistentr ink..... similar to what the new Epson inks are claiming.

[scottbergerphoto]

stoneylonesome wrote:
new girl on the bloc wrote:
John and Scott - many thanks for your advice. I'll be reading and trying these steps and see what I can come up with.

And tis' true, right now I am feeling pretty confused by it all, but the images that I have printed so far, all except for one that I printed on Kodak Ultima (too dark), have come out looking great.

And I thought I was the only one confused. My thing is and maybe I'm wrong, if it looks good to your eye and other people like it, than whatever you're doing is right. I have know problem with different papers even thou the results may very they in and of them selves can have a certain artistic appeal. I just wish Canon had a more water resistentr ink..... similar to what the new Epson inks are claiming.
If you like your results then that's all that counts! I'm happiest when the image I've worked on to get the way I like it on screen matches my printer's output. In the end the only person you have to please is you, unless of course your working for someone else.
Scott

[Tategoi]

Sorry if I have confused issues. My message is simply:

A camera ICc profile is totally irrelevant

You must calibrate your monitor

You do not need to use OEM papers. Even if lesser paper (cheaper and better) does not have an ICc profile you can still get outstandig results by trying out a few standard ones already in your system

I always want what my prints to come out as I see on screen and get it using a straighforward Canon desktop without customs made profiles and I get it using professional color flow management, custom made profiles the lot.

My message is to not overcomplicate the issue. Just do the basics and your prints will improve tenfold.

Epson's own book Complete Guide to Digital Printing by Rob Sheppard is a great book to learn and even he says to try other papers - just go play and try out all sorts, do some tests and have fun. no need to spend loads of money which is where my post came from - non oem papers are cheaper and in my view now better.

Don't want to quote have to quote Rob Sheppard too much but Scott, sorry, you are totally overcomplicating the issue for people printing out at home - a few basics and job done.

[Ikinaa]

Another question concerning printers...

does anyone refill the ink-cartridges?
I've got a 3 year old HP 930C, which I regularly refill, but it's always a mess, fingers are multi-color, but it works, colors are good for me.
What are your experiences with refilling the canons, epsons and hps?
Are some easier to refill than others?