Ernst, thanks for this information. That any printer manufacturer is re-purposing a profile or recommending this practice over different resolution settings is news to me. Based on my experience to date with keeping printers and profiles running precisely over extended periods of time, it sounds like a recipe for "good is good enough" printmaking, but not a recipe for getting the highest achievable accuracy. For that, more day-to-day quality control with instrumentation and purpose-built profiles still seems appropriate.
cheers,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com
Mark,
That day to day control could be the calibration per paper / paper batch. Epson though is telling us that its print engine is consistent enough without it, at least for the tasks outside the proof printing market. It could be that the switch to a single profile is related to the new weaving technology that appeared at the same time for the different brands. And where Epson is using variable droplets the other two have fixed droplet sizes (but fixed on two sizes for HP, possibly too for Canon) and must use a change in weaving patterns between resolutions to compensate for that, a simple curve would not fix twice the droplet volume density. Another issue then would be the drying time / color settling time. Like with more or less weaving strokes, more complicated weaving patterns can generate better output too with the same droplet quantity. Whether that still is resolution expressed in dpi is another matter, if it delivers that image quality to the eye it is good enough for me. I got the impression that Epson shifted the output more to its minimum droplet sizes in the 9900 and 3880 models so a similar solution is needed there as well.
There still is an image quality difference possible between different "resolutions" that is not related to the gamut or color consistency. Smoothness, detail reproduction, reduced aliasing etc. There's even more possible in that sense. As I understand it the same heads used on the Z2100-3100 models are used on the B9180. The last however lays down an even better dithering pattern, as testified by Neil Snape, to my knowledge with the same droplet sizes. As it is an A3+ printer the computing for an area like that is faster done than on a square meter for a wide format.
The days that the same droplet and similar weaving patterns were used to lay down a true 360 and a 720 dpi resolution are over. Then the compromise was visible in the Epson 9000's 360 dpi blacks that often suffered of white lines while the 720 dpi prints had bleeding blacks and banding of overlapping color strokes. A primitive form of what I described above on weaving quality as a replacement for resolution was also available in the 9000's "1440/720 resolution", every 720 dpi row in the head travel direction shifted half the dot pitch to the row before it, the media transport direction kept the 720 dpi resolution. So not a true 1440 dpi resolution either but nevertheless a smoother result.
met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst Dinkla
Try:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/
