Pixma pro 9500 and Hahnemuhle papers

[John Ferrillo]

I have something of an emergency.  I have crossed over from being a serious shutterbug into selling my work.  I have, for 4 years, had the i9900, and been very happy with the results on Hahnemuhle museum etching paper.  I have, recently, seen signs that I need a new printer (a strange band down the right side of my 8.5 x 11 prints), and, furthermore, am concerned about the lifespan of the  prints.  I also understand that, for my black and white work (an increasing proportion of my printing output), the i9900 was not state of the art.  My study of the situation, and basic trust in Canon, lead me to the pixma pro 9500, with its pigment inks.

I am *not* getting good results with the 9500, at least with my favorite Hahnemuhle paper.  I am in profile purgatory.  Flat colors, slaty skies, dark prints, poor definition to images.  I have tried everything- Hahnemuhle profiles, Canon easy printer pro plugins, you name it.

Does anyone out there have experience with this paper and this printer?  Am I just using the wrong media?  I have a pretty expensive stack of unused Hahnemuhle paper here.

[GKN]

I have tried a couple of prints on Hahnemule paper from the sample pack, using the Hahnemule profiles - I have got very good results. I did notice that the printer driver was initially defaulting to managing colours - I turned this off and let Lightroom manage colours. I must admit that the 9500 is my first injet printer, but the prints have stacked up good against other peoples prints I have compared with.

[neil snape]

I can't say for sure, but what I've seen as reports are the 9500 isn't all that good on matte FA media. This seems a little strange and can only be the ink limiting or what we call color maps and linearization. The same inks (well there are more inks) on the x100 series do just as well as HP on matte.

I know that when I profiled dye on Harman matte no matter what the settings it just was flat. Pigments though profile beautifully on the same media.

[Deepsouth]

I crossed over from the dye based S9000 to the pigment 9500, and I had the same results. The S9000 and its close cousin, the i9900, were pretty much WYSIWYG (remember that acronym?)

It's NOT the paper...it's the printer. Simply, if you don't want to profile, don't own this printer. The only non-profile method of using the 9500 adequately (sp)  is to use Easy Print Pro as a plug-in to PS. Even this is not 100% foolproof. The 9500 is cable of wonderful results, but you must profile.

You will probably have to pay for custom profiles, not many paper mfrs are offering profiles for it. The 9500 falls into a lonely niche. It's not a printer for the masses (pigment costs and operating complexity) but it is not large enough to attract the true pro market. If you call Canon, be sure to tell them it is for a Pixma Pro printer. They only have a few techs who specialize in this line.

[djgarcia]

I've been using the vendor profiles for Ilford Gold Fibre Silk and Hahnemuhle FA Baryta and the 9500 matches the results I get on my iPF6100, i.e. beautiful if slow. You may want to check the color matching settings and let the application handle it as opposed to the printer or Auto. Also make sure the paper type is as recommended for the profile.

[John Ferrillo]

I doubt anyone is continuing to follow this thread, but I have, in the last few months, found a technique that is yielding excellent results.  It is not WYSIWYG, but it works.  First, I found that switching off the printer color control in Windows XP was not obvious.  One uses the "main" tab on the Canon driver, selects "manual" on color/intensity, "set", and then "non" in the manual color adjustment window.  That still leaves the problem of extremely opaque shadows.  As much as it makes me cringe, I go to Shadow/Highlight in Image Adjustment in CS3, crank up the shadows setting 12% and the highlights 2 percent, and then print.  It looks absolutely horrendous onscreen, but the result is very comparable- in fact, superior- to my old i9900.  The colors are quite true and the image definition outstanding.  Also, I cannot use the Hahnemuhle profiles with their Museum Etching paper to good effect, but the Canon profiles for their Hahnemuhle made Museum Etching paper works quite well.  As is mentioned elsewhere on the web, their insistence on using 35mm borders makes their letter size paper unusable, but I like what I get with the larger A3+ very much.

[djgarcia]

I don't get it. If everything is set up and calibrated properly, with the proper profiles you shouldn't need to do anything to get nice looking prints that closely match the screen (remembering they are two different media and will never really look exactly the same). Of course you can always tweak, but it should be minimal.

Are you using the proper Media Type? One thing I found with the Hahnemuhle profiles is, well, I couldn't find the media type they specified for the iPF6100! I did a few tests, and for what they call Photo Paper Pearl 260g the Premium Semi-Glossy Paper 280 works perfectly.

But for the 9500, the specified Photo Paper Plus Semigloss worls fine for the Baryta paper. I notice that Hahnemuhle specifies Photo Paper Matte for Museum Etching, but there's also a "F.A. Museum Etching" entry in the driver. Which did you try?

Oh well, I just finished moving and fortunately both the 9500 and iPF6100 still closely match :-).