Hi, yes there's quite a few threads around here about patch counts, in particular a lot from the HP Z3100 / Z3200 series that might still have some useful info for other printers like your Epson P800.
My general takeaways from it all have been:
- Making our own profiles are very likely to give better results (sometimes grossly better) than any canned profile from a printer / media maker.
- Increasing patch counts generally improves results (going from say small double- or triple-digit counts to lower 4-digit counts).
- Improvement generally has diminishing returns as the patch counts get larger (higher 4-digit counts), and the tradeoff in time and cost becomes very real, so for most users it's unlikely to offer much benefit.
- Various optimization attempts such as "interstitially-nested grids", increased neutral axis density, etc, have had varying results reported -- sometimes a gain, sometimes not, and generally seems very case-specific and requiring fairly intense scrutiny to evaluate, like research-level effort. So might be similar to the diminishing returns above re effort vs benefit.
The ultimate measure is are you happy with your prints? The rest can become a never-ending science project...
So I say if your setup has some higher-count targets to try and you don't mind the effort/cost, go for it. I don't think there is much to lose with trying some lower 4-digit patch counts, tho many setups still give excellent results with much less.
I've been slowly chipping away at similar topic this year (with my Z3100 and Z3200) and so far the biggest improvement (on matte media) has been from increasing the ink density, I think moreso than profiling with larger targets.
