Hey gang,
Seeking some input from users of Windows and Epson P400, or P series printers. I have a former student that I haven't seen in three years who buttonholed me on Saturday. He recently bought an Epson P400 printer and has connected it to a Windows 10 box. My only Win10 implementation is a VM and I don't have a P400 to test.
He is a bit of a PC nerd, constantly playing with things. His Windows 10 device uses an nVidia card and a Spyder 5 Pro calibrated display. He says that the screen looks great but the prints he dumped on the table are dark and very contrasty nightmares. He had been printing on Kodak SemiMatte 4x6 paper, but since he thought it was glossy chose the Epson Gloss ICC profile. I asked him to print on paper with an actual ICC profile and his prints on Epson Gloss 5x7 were better but not much. He then started up his wife's MacBook and it discovered the P400 and connected to it wirelessly. He printed the same photo from Apple Photos and it looked very good, considering the nature of his test image which was harshly lit and slightly soft.
Since the print from the Mac with the default setup looked as good as possible, I am concluding that there is a problem in the configuration of the Windows machine. He prints from Photoshop and has manually added drivers for the nVidia card and for the printer, as opposed to using those supplied by Microsoft during machine setup. The video card is a GTX960M and he claims that the display looks "right" but the prints are without doubt awful. The print off the P400 from the Mac, looks like the original JPEG.
I would appreciate any thoughts or guidance as I am loathe to go build a Windows machine to support this fellow.
Thanks kindly,
Ross Chevalier
