Printer Profiling Options???

[Garnick]

Hello All,

I know a lot of you are profiling your printers and I have finally decided, for various reasons, to start the process myself with the 9900. So far I've been using he canned profiles and they've been doing a very acceptable job. However, I've recently had a print head replacement and have seen some irregularities in the prints at 720dpi, which I use for some of the work I do. I've had another service call to complete ALL of the "mechanical alignment" adjustments that were NOT done when it was installed. Recently I had a conversation with a tech at Epson Canada after he had looked at my test prints, before and after the installation. He asked if I had profiled the printer since the new head was installed, but of course my answer was "NO". He then said that whenever a new board or print head is installed the printer generally has to be re-profiled. So it would seem that I now have no choice but to start this process.

My question for you folks pertains to the type of equipment and software you are using for profiling. I've done some research and have found that the Spyder3 Print SR package has some excellent reviews and is really quite reasonably priced, compared to most other packages. However, I am rather skeptical as to the quality of the profiles that can be produced by a package in this price range. I'd like to get some feedback from anyone using this combination and perhaps some comparisons as well if possible.

All replies will be helpful and much appreciated.

Thanks,
Gary

[Schewe]

Recently I had a conversation with a tech at Epson Canada after he had looked at my test prints, before and after the installation. He asked if I had profiled the printer since the new head was installed, but of course my answer was "NO". He then said that whenever a new board or print head is installed the printer generally has to be re-profiled. So it would seem that I now have no choice but to start this process.

The tech is wrong...Epson's unit to unit variation is very, very low. That's why profiles released with the printer drivers can work so well across multiple units. It's one of the advantages of Epson print heads.

If the replacement head is not performing the same as the original head then there's something else going on.

Believe me, I've TRIED to make better profiles that the SP media profiles Epson USA releases (available from the US driver page) but now I don't bother. I know how those profiles are made and it's exactly the way I would make them so no real benefit. There are a few built-in profiles in the driver that aren't "perfect" but they are profiles for media I don't use.

Obviously, if you want to use non-Epson paper then you will benefit from rolling your own profiles in most cases. Some of the paper makers offer good profiles, some don't.

I would go back at the tech and make sure the replacement head is indeed correctly installed and all alignments have been made. Printing at 720 will require the head be completely within spec otherwise you'll see issue such as micro-banding...

[Light Seeker]

Is there a user initiated "calibration" for the 9900? If so, perhaps the tech meant re-calibrate, rather than re-profile.

Terry.

[Wayne Fox]

If your epson profiles are no longer satisfactory, then when the new head was installed it perhaps wasn't calibrated fully or correctly.  The printer to printer delta E variation for these printers is very small ... a new head shouldn't have affected the color significantly enough to see if installed correctly.

As suggested, the printer may need re-calibrated, but it shouldn't require custom profiling.  

(My apologies ... somehow I missed Jeff's reply so I just restated his thoughts ...  and not as well as he did).

[eronald]

You should certainly realign the print heads by means of the Epson utility.
User calibration can be done by means of the Epson ColorBase utility, I believe, however as the other posters indicate, if the heads are correctly installed and configured by the maintenance technician, there should be little to do.
 
Edmund

[Garnick]

Thanks Jeff, and to all who have responded. From what I have read, I tend not to think this is a profile related issue. Quite frankly, I was never convinced of that. It has never been a colour issue. This goes back to a thread I started about a week ago on the "printers, papers and inks" forum. At that time I stated that since the print head was replaced I had noticed that when printing at 720dpi everything seemed to have a "grainy" appearance. It was almost as if it were actually printing at a lower resolution, perhaps 360.

This printer has quite a history, and my "Issues Log" now has 65 entries and is growing. Finally last Thursday I had another service call to replace the pump/cap station, again. That was done at the end of November and was working great until about three weeks ago. I then started getting frequent nozzle dropouts again and was dumping ink in an attempt to remedy the situation. It's a long story and getting longer, so I won't bore you with the rest of it. When the tech replaced the head he did NOT do even an auto alignment from the control panel. I ended up doing that myself to see if it would fix the grainy appearance, but to no avail. When he came back to install a new pump/cap the new one was broken, so that wasn't done either. I did however show him what was happening in with the 720dpi printing as opposed to the way it looked before the print head installation. He then placed a couple of calls to another tech and went into service mode, where he did some mechanical adjustments to the print head carriage. They hadn't been done previously either, but didn't help anyway. He took two of my test prints(before and after) to a tech at Epson Canada and it was he who told me that the printer would have to be re-profiled. I'll be talking with him again Monday, but I'm still at a loss about what could be causing this. Printing at 1440 seems to be OK, so perhaps that's where I'll stay from now on. I also do enlargements for a couple of labs here in town and 720dpi has always done well for that type of printing, but not now. And the Epson tech I talked to by phone was definitely talking about re-profiling, not recalibrating. It was a rather lengthy discussion and I questioned him on that several times.

One more thing. When the field tech was finished he printed my test image from his laptop and it did appear somewhat better, so that's another issue. As far as I know nothing else has changed in my situation, other than the new print head. Certainly no new connections or anything that could contribute to this problem, at least nothing that I've been able to determine. Hopefully we'll be able to come to some conclusion soon.

Thanks again to all.
Gary