John,
Don't misunderstand me.
I CAN make calibrations and profiles on matte papers, just NOT on a particular wood veneer. The veneer has curling, and it really doesn't have anything one would call a "White Point". In my case, it may just be asking the spectrophotometer too much.
I understand the frustration, certainly.
It could be software, but as Ernst says, could be a setting. Also, could be hardware failure.
Actually, how old is your Z3100?
Try looking at the suggestions I've made:
Try running a blast of canned air up under the carriage on the right side where the ESP is - never know- maybe some crap up under there. If you have a mechanic's mirror, you could shine a bright light and see if anything looks "foggy". Then figure a way to wipe it or clean it.
Don't be so quick to blame software. I recently did that, thinking the color center "synchronize paper presets" was missing and I went around and around endlessly uninstalling/reinstalling until finally a friend helped me and proved that the software had changed, and what I was looking for existed in a different form. Everything worked right after that.
I still can't calibrate the WOOD VENEER, but I can surely calibrate all Matte papers.
If it was me, I'd certainly look at the ESP (color sensor).
Bryan Glynn (guy who did the belt replacement video- kaelaria here) said on his website:
"...One tip I forgot to show – while you have the carriage assembly out and are cleaning it, be sure to wipe clean the color sensor shutter mirror. It’s on the tiny trap door on the color sensor itself. It is often hazy and obscured over time which can fail the unit. Do not clean the sensor lens or emmiter underneath, it should not need it at all..."
EDIT:
See Diagrams of the Spectrophotometer HereEDIT 2: It came back to me that when I tried calibrating the wood veneer that it got to the end and wouldn't finsh the calibration install. At one point, the calibration got hung in process - couldn't do anything. Fortunately, I have the printer driver and HP Utility running on a VMWare machine running Windows 8.1 Pro and I was able to get it going again and tried another calibration from the Windows machine, which ALSO failed at the very end. That tells me it's an issue either with the material being calibrated or an issue with the ESP, and NOT the software, mainly because the architecture is entirely different Windows to Mac OS. It was shortly after the failure tests (tried 4 times on the wood veneer) that I went back and calibrated a Matte paper with ZERO problems.
