thank you very much for this well-researched and balanced article on the decision process that precedes the purchase of a new inkjet printer.

You are only touching on the issue of colour management by mentioning the profiles that are either supplied by printer manufacturers or that are provided by paper manufactures for certain popular printers. Since reading your article a few question regarding the colour management on a Windows PC arose.

I became aware of colour management when I acquired a Gretag Macbeth i1 Display to calibrate the screen of my notebook. This made me more confident with tweaking colours in Lightroom or Photoshop, especially when seeing that the results on screen matched the prints, produced in a professional lab or on my Canon printers (Pixma iP8500 and an old S9000) with Canon papers (Photo Paper Pro, Photo Paper Plus Semi-gloss and Matte Photo Paper).

At the beginning I had a problem with images that I converted from my Canon 20D’s RAW files into the Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB colour spaces. When I sent photos from one of these colour spaces to my Canon printers (Photoshop print settings: “printer manages color” and either “relative colorimetric” or “perceptual” as rendering intent), the colours of the prints looked extremely desaturated. I never bother unearthing the profiles, supplied by Canon, as I quickly developed a work around and was told by a friend that the Canon profiles aren’t perfect.

In order to get a print, which matches the colours on screen with my Photoshop print settings, I need to convert my photos from Adobe RGB/ProPhoto RGB to sRGB. I believe, the Canon printer drivers cannot deal with Adobe RGB/ProPhoto RGB files. So far this slightly more labour-intensive “conversion to sRGB” workflow yielded good results.

Recently I became fond of Hahnemuehle’s papers, especially their Photo Rag Duo 276, Photo Rag 308 and Photo Rag Pearl 320. I am also quite excited about their new FineArt Baryta 325, which I hope to try soon. However Hahnemuehle doesn’t supply profiles form my printers and I am not too pleased with the prints when using my workflow and the canned paper profiles in the Canon printer driver. I can’t say that the colours are off, but I believe that the printers could do better on these papers, especially with regard to shadow detail. Hence I am considering to get a custom profile for these papers and at least one of my printers to see whether it yields a “significant” improvement in print quality from a inkjet printer with 6 and 8 colours respectively. I am also hoping that custom profiles will allow me to bypass the “conversion to sRGB” step and enable Photoshop as well as Lightroom to handle the colour management.

There’s another question regarding custom paper profiles for my printers. Ordering high quality profiles, made from test prints with 700+ patches, can become quite costly, especially when one needs profiles for several paper-printer combinations. On my search I came across Colorvision’s PrintFix Pro device. Some people get very good results with it out of the box or after tweaking profiles in the software. Others adamantly dislike PrintFix Pro’s LED-based spectrocolorimeter, because they believe, sampling more than 700 patches is too awkward and only more expensive spectrophotometers as offered by x-rite can produce high quality profiles. If PrintFix is any good, it would be an obvious choice, as I can get one fairly cheap (approximately for the cost of 6 professional custom profiles, ordered from a reputable expert).

I appreciate your feedback and thoughts regarding my colour management workflow, custom profiles and printer profiling devices like PrintFix Pro or i1 Photo. In advance thank you very much for your input on this topic!

All the best,
Andy

Just not their newer K3 inks.

Thanks, I’ll update the post.

Narrowing Things Down
After reading, talking, and taking notes for a few weeks, Dale and I came down to three printers:

Epson Stylus Photo R1800
13×19 inch prints
Borderless prints
Individual ink tanks, user replaceable
Dye based ink
$537 at amazon

great post, and i have been reading you other post “Pigment vs. dye inks - Which is best?” and i am still not sure which printer you would recommend should one get the PIXMA Pro9000 or the pigment printer PIXMA Pro9500 does the pigment printer make a big difference or is it only the archival properties that is the difference?

I bought the Red River alcohol soaked paper and a refill alcohol bottle for it (guess I could use regular drug store stuff, ‘eh?) but have not used it yet.

Like you, I’m happy with the printer and I’ve printed a lot on it with little problem. And, like you I’m waiting for both the i9500 pigment printer but also the i9000 dye based replacement for this printer. Pigment inks, while more long lasting will clog. At least they do in Epson’s models and I have nothing against dye based inks if they get the chemistry right for longevity. Supposedly in Canon’s Chromalife 100 chemistry things are much more archival than our inks. Time will tell with all of this I guess.

Thanks for your report Eric and let us know what else you find out.

Tonight I just removed the print head and sprayed the nozzles with a can of air (after making sure to cover the copper side so i wouldn’t spray ink all over the room).

I also have been spending a lot of time blotting the ink pad with q-tips and paper towels. I don’t know an easy way to remove this pad, so it has beem an long process. I also removed the 2 pads from where the print head sits, and rinsed them under warm water.

There is now way to get all of this excess ink, so I hope this works for awhile. I love this printer, too. I’ve had it just over a year, so I’d prefer to keep it working until the i9500 comes out.

I love the i9900 printer and the prints I’m getting out of it are spectacular. Almost every problem I’ve run into I’ve solved eventually and none of them has to do with the printer itself, they generally have to do with paper or humidity.

I’ll be interested to hear how you solve your problem. Thanks for your comment and good luck with a solution.