Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/03/19

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Subject: [Leica] Canon i950 review, part 1
From: Martin Howard <mvhoward@mac.com>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 10:53:31 -0800

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.

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