How long doe a printing appliance's profile remain valid? Years? A day? A few hours?
If a print service posts a printer profile online for soft proofing is it likely that it will really be the same profile used at the print facility on the morning that the print I have ordered is made?
printers such as Noritsu's, Fuji Frontiers (which are made by Noritsu), and ZBE Chromira's have a calibration process performed daily or sometimes multiple times daily which adjusts the printers output to a calibrated state. This process is accomplished by measuring various patches with a high end densitometer, and the result is very stable and consistent output, despite the normal day to day variations the chemical processes introduce. I've compared final calibration prints made months apart, and the grey patches measure within 0.01 of each other, and visually there is no difference. So much like inkjet printers, the output of these printers is stable enough the profile will be valid until some major change occurs. In fact many labs use a profile made by the paper manufacturer, and not one they've made. I've compared the
Kodak Endura Premier for Chromira profile made by Kodak to the one I made and they are pretty much identical. The Kodak one was made a few years ago when the new Endura paper was introduced.
As far as the process, the color management systems are designed into the printers software/firmware. The economics of these devices including initial investment (my Chromira cost me about $150k) and maintenance as well as the low revenue per print means they have to produce large volumes of work. There really are only two reasons these machines are still in widespread use, one is the low cost of making a print compared to inkjet, the other is the speed which prints can be made. But to make them viable they must produce thousands of prints daily, and any interruption to that process is costly.
Despite the limitations, the cost of prints is low enough compared to inkjet that many photographers including professionals find the output more than adequate for what they are doing. Despite the lack of full color management control by the photographer, the output is pretty consistent and good quality. Most labs support AdobeRGB as well as sRGB now, so the main thing missing for advanced photographers is the ability to tag the rendering intent of the image. The devices are of such limited gamut that perceptual pretty much always delivers good results and it's pretty rare that using relative offers an improvement. In the past five years I've had one case where an image looked weird and forcing a relative intent on it improved it.
There is another issue involved in this process and that's the submission software many labs use. In the U.S. almost all the big labs (WHCC, mPix, Bay Photo, etc) as well as many of the smaller ones use a program called ROES for their customer to submit work. It's pretty powerful, flexible, and very customizable allowing all kinds of products to be ordered and created by the customer, and the software on the lab end does all the work in creating the file to be submitted to the printer. But ROES has no color management capability, including allowing a relative/perceptual tag to be passed to the lab.
I print orders for thousands of different customers each year. None have ever asked if they could have my profile so they could convert the image themselves. Only a handful have ever asked if they could have the profile so they could soft proof. Most don't even have a clue how to soft proof, let alone the skill to do it well. While those that frequent this forum may have more knowledge and awareness and varying degrees of skill in applying color management in their workflow, they are not typical of the customers of these labs. So while certainly there are ways that a lab could provide some system to tag a rendering intent or allow customers to convert before submission, the cost of providing the software to automate it, or the cost of loosing production time with a manual process for most labs just isn't appealing, because there really isn't a demand for it.
I fully understand where some of you are coming from, including Andrew whose expertise in color management I greatly respect. But most photographers who I provide services for that are very discerning and fully color management aware don't buy prints from these devices, they are more than happy to pay the higher price for a print from my Epson 11880 or 9900. I could provide a service to allow someone to convert and submit manually so they would have more control , but then why would anyone buy them if they are similar price as a high quality inkjet print?
