Mark, you are making an assumption that PrinTao 8 lays down ink "exactly" as the Epson native driver does. Maybe yes, maybe no. My only point is that if you use a profile made using the Epson driver "there could be slight differences between hue and color density" which means a profile might not be interchangeable. Say you grow dissatisfied with IGFS as your standard paper and want to move to a new one that is not supported by PrinTao 8, how do you profile that paper? Do you do it using the Epson driver or does PrinTao 8 have a feature to print out a patch set using their driver. In looking at the PrinTao website it appears that they provide profiles for the supported papers (which of course adds cost to the product as each new paper that is added requires someone to create a profile).
Were I to use this product I would want to make certain that the profile works as intended (rather than comparing patch sets, I would probably just re-profile the paper just as if I were moving to a new printer). Maybe the PrinTao driver is 'equivalent' to the Epson driver as you note in comparing LR to PrinTao prints. You do note a couple of differences in LR vs PrinTao in your review. What is not intuitive to me is the behavior of a profile between the two drivers.
Please don't think that I'm taking anything away from the quality of the review, it's just that for the price of this product there are questions that would need to be answered for prospective purchasers. In my case is just an academic exercise as I am on Windows and won't be using this product and were I to switch, Qimage appears to do everything that PrinTao does for Windows users.
Alan
I am not making any assumption about what goes on under the hood in respect to how ink gets laid down in either the Epson driver or PT8. I don't have such inside technical insight into their secret sauces, so don't make such inferences. Just read what I said about comparative print quality - the bottom line that matters.
I try different papers all the time because distributors send me sample packs to work with and report on as I see fit. My standard procedure is to start with their profiles and then do my own custom profiling. To assure that there is no colour management lurking in the background I use the Adobe Color Print Utility for generating the profiling target pages, read the patches, generate the profiles and store them where they belong. I can load these very same profiles into PT8 and use them successfully, a judgment based on the results - i.e. prints of standard printer test images and real world photographs, not inferences about stuff under the hood of which I know nothing useful. Nothing I've seen in PT8 allows one to create printer/paper profiling targets with complete assurance of their being no colour management. The application was not meant for colour management geeks - it was meant for people who just want to make (really good) prints easily. If I am wrong about this, Jan Rossee can jump in and correct me.
As for "questions that need to be answered for prospective purchasers", there may be that need in your mind, but were it me I'd be rather hesitant to project that mindset onto the general clientele for this product. Prospective purchasers can download a demo, try it in their own environment for their own needs, testing it in whatever way that shows them what they want to see and decide whether or not it's for them, without getting into matters that are arcane to a very high proportion of the people out there who just want easy but high quality printing.
That's really all I can say about this particular issue Alan, so I won't be engaging further on it.
