Z3200 Custom Paper Presets

[John Caldwell]

The Harman FB Gloss prints are very dark in the quarter to half tone range. Color Balance, per se, is good. My impression that ink limits are too generous, although I don't detect pooling or buckling. Has anyone experimented with reducing ink limits as a means of controlling dark prints.

Harman in the UK is very interested in helping I believe, but they don't have access to anything other than a Z6100, so their yet to be done testing will still need to be extrapolated some for a Z3200 application. HP tech support in the states literally comes across as having no familiarity with fineart printing.

Many thanks,

John-

[neil snape]

Can I assume you calibrated and profiled the media?

To what settings?

I have some here but not enough left to profile a 9.18 chart.

It may need less inking, I don't know. HP and Hahnemuhle Baryta hold up well to heavy inking, but the surfaces are not the same.

I suppose that Ilford Silk would be more similar to Harman, perhaps a profile for IGSilk would work.

[John Caldwell]

Thanks for your reply, Neil.

Yes, it is the HP Print Utility that was used to generate a Custom Paper Preset for the Harman paper in question, and the resulting prints are the very dark prints I described in the OP.

You'll recall that a paper preset not only encompasses ICC profile generation, but also parameters like ink limits, GE dosing, star wheel position, platen gap, P/M Black assignments and others. Media Type selection is yet another variable that impacts these values, so the type initially selected in the Preset generation process also plays a significant role.

I have begun to experiment with reducing ink limits through the Change Printing Characteristics in the Managing Paper Presets dialog. Ink limits work on a +80 to +120 scale, with 100 being the default. Thus far I've generated two presets with reduced ink limits: 90 and 94. Clearly the prints are better in terms of the original "dark" complaints, but there appears to be some new limitation of gamut and color contrast, just as one might predict in using less ink.

Thanks,

John Caldwell