Tony,
I have to respectfully disagree with you wrt driver differences, with certain assumptions. If the drivers are truly operating in all color management off mode, then they are delivering the RGB values of each pixel unmodified to the printer, therefore there should be no difference. I'm assuming also that the printer didn't change, i.e. no new firmware.
Richard Southworth
Richard,
No problem, disagreement and friendly discussion is good and I certainly do not disagree with the assumptions you are making about drivers operation and the delivery of data.
However we are faced with a system (two actually) that we cannot personally dive into and get hands dirty, with currently no obvious answer as to the whys and wherefores of what appears to be delivery of different data from the same image.
Between the two systems virtually everything is a variable and while certain things may seem highly improbable they cannot IMO be ruled out without first investigating. It is also not unusual in any complex system to find more than one problem area that when combined produce a fault but on their own wont necessarily show.
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I'm not a windows user, but when this happens on a mac it is either a driver installation issue, or a setting in one of the driver dialog boxes that is usually to blame. On windows I believe there are some other issues to get the OS from interfering.
Agreed, driver issues are just as likely to cause an unexpected problem with Windows the same as Mac. Although I have an iMac on my desktop I have not bothered with colour management as it is not really suited to photo editing due to monitor issues. As to Windows colour management there have been some improvements over the years with OS changes but also some seemingly backward steps. Bottom line is that we cannot make assumptions and must check everything in a colour managed workflow if things appear to go wrong.
Based on the information so far however I can't determine which of the two machines is delivering "accurate" color. It is quite possible that incorrect settings on the original machine produced a print that was then compensated for by the display profile and luminance calibration, and the new machine is producing "accurate color".
Spot on, which of the two systems produces the better or more accurate colour, and in this scenario we have come back to the differences in display profile.
I didn't read all the replies (sorry, really slammed), but the first thing to do is download a known standard reference file such as bill atkinsons (there's a recent thread that provides a link to his file) or the one at outbackphoto.com and print that. That shouldn't print light, if it does then something is amiss (and I leave that to the windows users), but I assume typical things like double checking all settings in windows color managment, maybe reinstalling the printer drivers, etc.
Interesting idea about printing a third party reference file, but you could argue that the images presented are actually reference files in themselves in as much as they contain an interpretation of the same data from two different systems. Still it may prove a useful test if it confirms that one system prints darker than the other from the same data.
Well...that didn't make a difference. Removed the Win10 driver and installed the Win7 driver. It did not install a lot of auxiliary junk but the driver installed alright. Alas, the end result is identical to the one with Win10 driver. Back to square one....
Niranjan, thats a shame as you say back to square one
Through all this I guess we all make some assumptions and one of mine is that the prints shown were made at the same time through both systems and that enough alternative images also compared that way and the difference is darker images from the old system. Further that the ink set and paper batch remained exactly the same throughout the tests. Can you confirm this to be the case?
