Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/03/19
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]About a month ago, I bought a Canon i950 inkjet printer. I've promised the LUG a review of this and, having now played with it relatively extensively for three or four weekends, I'm ready to share my experiences, views, and opinions on it. I shall start off by giving you some background as to what considerations went into my purchase. This will help you assess whether my experiences are relevant to you -- and thus help you pick and choose which part of my review you find useful... or not. For those who don't care about this, just skip to "Meat" of the review. BACKGROUND I had been asking friends and photographers (these are not mutually exclusive categories) for tips and techniques that can help you to learn to "see" photographically, when one photographer whose work I admire tremendously suggested something that struck a chord in me (he has requested to remain anonymous). He recommended printing 5x7" work prints and pinning them up on the walls around me, or carrying them around. Which ever I choose, the aim is to see them every day. His point was that photographers looking for their own vision must fill themselves with their own pictures. I loved the sound of this. I also, unfortunately, for various reasons, would find it very difficult to have a wet darkroom at the moment. So, I decided to look for a scanner and printer that would allow me to print mostly B&W 5x7" prints, with the occasional 8x10" (or rather 8.5x11") for framing, should I actually shoot something that I liked. As a result, I didn't want to spend too much money. I set a printer budget of $300, thinking that if I really like this stuff, I can always buy a more expensive printer later. Epson didn't appear to have much in the way of interesting stuff around the $300-mark, although they appear to be the (until now?) undisputed masters of photographic inkjet printing. Canon, on the other hand, had just released the i850 which looked good, until I read a review on a UK site about a new, six-colour inkjet called the i950. For $250, I got a letter-sized, separate ink, photo quality printer. Looked good to me. A week later, B&H got them in stock and I ordered one. MEAT It probably took all of 10 minutes to unpack the unit, set it up, do the first nozzle alignment test print, and then print my first, photo quality, full colour 4x6" test print. You couldn't tell the difference between it and a 1h photo store print. If anything, the i950's print is better. Colour saturation is increadible. Sharpness and detail phenominal. Colour fidelity seems to be about what I'd expect to get from a 1h store. But... I don't want to do 4x6" colour 1h prints. I want to do B&W at 5x7" and 8x10". So, I scanned one of my Tri-X negatives at 2820 dpi, downsized it to 5x7" and printed it on Epson Borderless 5x7" Premium Glossy Photo Paper. I decided to compare the firmware's way of doing everything to my way, so I made two prints. The file in both cases was an RGB file, but the first print I made by clicking the "greyscale" box in the Canon printer driver. The second I made as a straight colour print. The first print came out cool. The whole print is slightly cyan -- not much, but definately cool in tone. I'm not a fan of cool tones, at least, not as a standard setting. From this, I concluded that they used all six inks even in greyscale printing. The second print (colour) came out greenish. There was a definate green cast in the shadows. It appeared as though Canon's firmware did a better job of translating RGB input into six-colour ink than taking a raw RGB file. Since those first test prints, I have spent two weekends printing images, trying to get repeatable, predictable results from what I see on the screen, without having to buy more expensive hardware. I shall shortcut this by saying that I have had reasonable success (more on this later), but that it took a lot of experimenting. My method was to create greyscale wedges and print these (along with normal photographic images) while manipulating the various settings. I decided that I was happy with the idea that what I got on the screen may not be exactly what I'd get on paper, provided I could target my images (by tonal correction layers, ICC profiles, duotones, or whatever) in a repeatable manner so that they would have the same tonal scale as my reference prints. I would then be able to edit images to my liking on the screen, apply the i950 targeting procedure, and get an image which would look the way I wanted it to. Part of the problem is that there are very many ways of manipulating colour using Photoshop 7 and the i950. Some variations are: * Photoshop colour management (PCM) + ColorSync profiles in printer * PCM + Canon BJ colour management (BJCM) * PCM + Canon printer driver manual colour correction (MCC) * PCM + BJCM + MCC * PCM + ColorSync + MCC * PCM + BJCM + printer's greyscale option * PCM + BJCM + greyscale option + MCC * PCM + no automatic colour correction in printer + MCC * PCM + no colour correction of any kind in printer (An odd sidenote: Canon ship an ICC profile for this printer which is called "BJ Color Printer Profile 2000". Apart from appearing to be a generic profile and [presumably] three years out of date, you cannot select any other ICC profile in the Canon BJ printer driver [although they do ship and install a "BJ Color Printer Profile 1999"] but rather your only other option is to choose to not use ICC profiles [i.e. ColorSync] at all in favor of the built-in BJ colour correction, or no colour correction what so ever.) Add to this that colour manipulation in Photoshop can include at least those in the list below, and each of these can usually be done in more than one way: * Hue/Saturation manipulation (on image, or in layer) * "Variations" dialog box * "Color Balance" dialog box * Duotone/Tritone/Quadtone spot colour curve manipulation * RGB curve manipulation (on image, or in a layer) * CMYK curve manipulation (on image, or in a layer) * Proof printing + PCM If you use adjustments layers with those that allow it, then to add to the mix are the ten or more blending options, opacity, and fill levels also available for manipulation. - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html