I"m still researching this machine and had friends print out the Atkinson color target for me on both PhotoRag and a Satin rc paper of their choice on the Z, the Canon, and Epson K3. On the HPZ3100 we did it 20x30 also.
On ALL of these printouts - Epson 9800 carefully managed out of Studio Print, Canon IFP 9000 out of their plug in, and the Z3100 out of their Photoshop Plug In, - the only differences in any of these targets were as follows:
Greens: the HP had the best gamut with the ability to display green content that the others couldn't. But I'll go back and look it over again.
Reds: The Epson K3 and the Canon Lucia had a tiny advantage in the saturation of the strawberries of that target. All the other colors were identical, including the blues and purples.
Greyscale: The HPZ had more truely "neutral" grey scale while the monochrome of the others was a hair to the warm side, Epson being the warmest. ( Epson had chaned their blacks in the 11880) They all looked good there though.
Now this is just one test with three machines, and if the Canon had a better software rip it might jump ahead, don't know. But the Z really held its own, especially considering it doesn't need to be sprayed to avoid gloss issues and the permanence is twice what the other two are.
john
IT should be quite the opposite. The one colour the Z does well is green. The perceptual differences between the darkest saturated greens even with Epson is minimized, barely perceptible in the darks and shadows.
Since it is in the upper ranges where spring time greens live, the Z beats all other printers hands down for this.
IF you are comparing profiles for third party media perhaps the Z profiles were not created in the same way. The out of gamut check in Photoshop often amplifies effects much more than a visual might do. I have some images of backlit tulips in a field in Washington that shows a lot of out of gamut greens on Epson whereas the Z covers almost all of the image regardless of the saturation and brightness. The older 9600 profiles shouldn't be much different than the new K3 profiles of which I've done a lot of testing on. In this testing I never found a "real" problem with the Z in greens at any level , only with the sometimes poor quality return portion of the profiles' tables creating a flawed representation of what the print really will do.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=168973\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]