Calibrate monitor and printer - what to buy

[howardm]

My hunch is that some companies don't take it seriously and do silly things like try it themselves w/o
sufficient knowledge/experience or hand it off to a summer intern

Some are smarter/better and may contract w/ a color guru to make the profiles.

[digitaldog]

My hunch is that some companies don't take it seriously and do silly things like try it themselves w/o
sufficient knowledge/experience or hand it off to a summer intern

Some are smarter/better and may contract w/ a color guru to make the profiles.

Legally, they have to pay a pretty steep licensing fee to an off-the-shelf profile making vendor so it seems odd they'd pay literally thousands of dollars per profile then do a sloppy job. I have no idea why some canned profiles are so poor however. Making a good one isn't rocket science these days.

[Ellis Vener]

to get back to the basic question. The video series that Schewe  and Reichman produced is an excellent presentation of hows, whys, and whats of getting exceedingly high  quality images from capture to finished print. http://www.luminous-landscape.com/videos/tutorials/camera_to_print_and_screen.shtml

[jaclarkaus]

Forgive me for being new,but ...

Wouldn't the way the ink reacts with the paper differ from supplier to supplier? Thickness, opacity, levels of pigments or whatever, are all different (I used to work for a major print company some years ago)

If so, the canned profile will work better for some printers than others.

Rolling your own should take these variations into account (along with batch to batch variations).

[Tony Jay]

Forgive me for being new,but ...

Wouldn't the way the ink reacts with the paper differ from supplier to supplier? Thickness, opacity, levels of pigments or whatever, are all different (I used to work for a major print company some years ago)

If so, the canned profile will work better for some printers than others.

Rolling your own should take these variations into account (along with batch to batch variations).

In a word, No.
Any profile, canned or not, is a paper/printer(ink) profile.
So even the canned profiles are specific for the paper/printer combination.
Some paper manufacturers have historically made fairly poor profiles but in general the standard has improved greatly.
(Also printers themselves are also much more consistent model-to-model so variations there are much smaller - perhaps even non-existant.)
So, depending on the paper/printer combination that one uses a custom profile may be the way to go or the canned profile may be as good as any custom profile.

Tony Jay