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Author Topic: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation  (Read 7659 times)

Doug Gray

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Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« on: February 15, 2019, 04:56:01 pm »

This will be a running commentary. Purpose is to establish where and how differences in printing occurs


My printer arrived today. No issues setting it up. Impressive printer.
IK have not run Plat Pro paper to calibrate. Just at the defaults for now

First steps will be to print targets using I1Profiler's print direct then ACPU then Null trick, then PSP using the XPS driver. Next will be running a calibration with Plat Pro Paper.


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Mark D Segal

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #1 on: February 15, 2019, 08:42:52 pm »

Why not run the calibration before you do all that, just to be sure all is in optimal shape before all that testing?

Looking forward to your results.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Doug Gray

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #2 on: February 15, 2019, 09:16:57 pm »

Why not run the calibration before you do all that, just to be sure all is in optimal shape before all that testing?

Looking forward to your results.

I want to compare before and after. And basically to see what differences there are between the 4 target printing approaches prior to calibrating. That is, using the default do they vary?

I expect that there will be differences after calibration (otherwise what's the point?).

What I'm curious about is how those differences are reflected. Do they only impact PSP? If so one can presume the calibration process only effects PSP. OTOH if it's not limited to PSP, then does it have the same effect on the other three target print techniques as on the PSP. Or does it differ.

Also, how much change occurred as a result of calibration?

I want to understand what's going on behind the scenes with the Canon Pro1000. I rather like their approach for easily achieving compatibility across a lot of printers using the same profiles but their technical info on what's going on and where leaves a lot to be desired.  So I'm treating it as something of a black box that needs to be analyzed.
« Last Edit: February 15, 2019, 09:20:36 pm by Doug Gray »
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vikcious

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #3 on: February 16, 2019, 03:48:31 am »

I want to compare before and after. And basically to see what differences there are between the 4 target printing approaches prior to calibrating. That is, using the default do they vary?

I expect that there will be differences after calibration (otherwise what's the point?).

What I'm curious about is how those differences are reflected. Do they only impact PSP? If so one can presume the calibration process only effects PSP. OTOH if it's not limited to PSP, then does it have the same effect on the other three target print techniques as on the PSP. Or does it differ.

Also, how much change occurred as a result of calibration?

I want to understand what's going on behind the scenes with the Canon Pro1000. I rather like their approach for easily achieving compatibility across a lot of printers using the same profiles but their technical info on what's going on and where leaves a lot to be desired.  So I'm treating it as something of a black box that needs to be analyzed.

I am so anxious about this journey of yours with Canon! I've got a feeling it's gonna be interesting! ;)
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Panagiotis

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #4 on: February 16, 2019, 06:21:55 am »

I want to compare before and after. And basically to see what differences there are between the 4 target printing approaches prior to calibrating. That is, using the default do they vary?

I expect that there will be differences after calibration (otherwise what's the point?).

What I'm curious about is how those differences are reflected. Do they only impact PSP? If so one can presume the calibration process only effects PSP. OTOH if it's not limited to PSP, then does it have the same effect on the other three target print techniques as on the PSP. Or does it differ.

Also, how much change occurred as a result of calibration?

I want to understand what's going on behind the scenes with the Canon Pro1000. I rather like their approach for easily achieving compatibility across a lot of printers using the same profiles but their technical info on what's going on and where leaves a lot to be desired.  So I'm treating it as something of a black box that needs to be analyzed.

Doug, you can perform color calibration at any time and enable it or disable it from the printer driver:

Printing Preferences --> Main --> Media Type --> Advanced Settings --> Calibration Value : Printer Default/Use Value/Disregard Value.

or from the operation panel:

Maintenance --> Color Calibration --> Enable/Disable adjustments values


Also some observations about PRO-1000 and PRO-4000 (and I assume PRO-2000, PRO-6000) and media types.

Both printers use the same printhead PF-10 and the same inkset.

PRO-4000 offers an expanded set of media types which almost all can be used as base to create custom media types. PRO-1000 is limited in this regard.

Both Hahnemuhle and Canson use, for its of their papers, different media types for the 1000 and the 4000.

For example Hahnemuhle for all its MK papers on the 1000 suggest "Highest Density Fine Art Paper" a MBK black only media type,
but for the 4000 and MK papers suggest (and build their profiles on) "Heavy Weight Fine Art Paper" which uses both blacks MBK and PBK.

Canson does similar. For the 4000 and MK paper Rag Photographique 310 uses, as the base of it's custom media type, "Fine Art Textured" which is also a dual black (MBK/PBK) media type but for the 1000 "Highest Density Fine Art Paper" a MBK black only media type.

From these observations (and Mark's conclusions in his review) there are differences between the desktop and the roll models despite the same head and inks and it would be interesting to investigate if color calibration can be used to "align" a desktop to a roll PRO model or it's useful only for PRO printers in the same category.
« Last Edit: February 16, 2019, 09:17:53 am by Panagiotis »
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Alan Goldhammer

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #5 on: February 16, 2019, 07:27:36 am »

Look forward to the ongoing discussion.  However, for me the two downsides compared to the Epson P800 are the lack of roll paper support (no pano capability) and the significantly higher weight of the printer (not easy for an 'older' man to move and set it up solo).
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #6 on: February 16, 2019, 08:34:37 am »

I want to compare before and after. And basically to see what differences there are between the 4 target printing approaches prior to calibrating.

OK, in that context understood. I thought the main purpose was to compare between target printing approaches, but what you are doing will also show the impact of calibration, which is useful.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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dehnhaide

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Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #7 on: February 16, 2019, 10:24:53 am »

Look forward to the ongoing discussion.  However, for me the two downsides compared to the Epson P800 are the lack of roll paper support (no pano capability) and the significantly higher weight of the printer (not easy for an 'older' man to move and set it up solo).
Weight, who said weight? Are those 100+kg of the PRO-2000 enough.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
« Last Edit: February 17, 2019, 03:55:37 pm by dehnhaide »
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Doug Gray

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #8 on: February 16, 2019, 02:29:42 pm »

Doug, you can perform color calibration at any time and enable it or disable it from the printer driver:

Printing Preferences --> Main --> Media Type --> Advanced Settings --> Calibration Value : Printer Default/Use Value/Disregard Value.

or from the operation panel:

Maintenance --> Color Calibration --> Enable/Disable adjustments values

Thanks. Useful.
Quote


Also some observations about PRO-1000 and PRO-4000 (and I assume PRO-2000, PRO-6000) and media types.

Both printers use the same printhead PF-10 and the same inkset.

PRO-4000 offers an expanded set of media types which almost all can be used as base to create custom media types. PRO-1000 is limited in this regard.

Both Hahnemuhle and Canson use, for its of their papers, different media types for the 1000 and the 4000.

For example Hahnemuhle for all its MK papers on the 1000 suggest "Highest Density Fine Art Paper" a MBK black only media type,
but for the 4000 and MK papers suggest (and build their profiles on) "Heavy Weight Fine Art Paper" which uses both blacks MBK and PBK.

Canson does similar. For the 4000 and MK paper Rag Photographique 310 uses, as the base of it's custom media type, "Fine Art Textured" which is also a dual black (MBK/PBK) media type but for the 1000 "Highest Density Fine Art Paper" a MBK black only media type.

From these observations (and Mark's conclusions in his review) there are differences between the desktop and the roll models despite the same head and inks and it would be interesting to investigate if color calibration can be used to "align" a desktop to a roll PRO model or it's useful only for PRO printers in the same category.

It's interesting that one can create a unique media type from one of the standard settings and register it with the media manager. It shows up in the driver but not in PSP.

Does anyone know how to access the actual driver settings from PSP? It appears to use the default for the selected media type.
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Panagiotis

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #9 on: February 16, 2019, 02:37:40 pm »

It's interesting that one can create a unique media type from one of the standard settings and register it with the media manager. It shows up in the driver but not in PSP.

Does anyone know how to access the actual driver settings from PSP? It appears to use the default for the selected media type.

Don't forget to update, with the new custom media type, both the regular driver and the XPS driver. Windows treat them as separate printers. Then you must see the custom media type in PSP also.
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Doug Gray

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #10 on: February 16, 2019, 03:43:02 pm »

The profiles all showed excellent gamut edge characteristics with very smooth, not ratty edges across the full range of L* slices. Much cleaner than my 9800 or 9500II.  Black L* was good ranging from 2.8 to 3.0. Gamut volume was good as well.

Profiles all tested against each other by creating a set of 100,000 random RGB values, applying them to the profile's device space, and running them through the AtoB1 tables to produce the estimated LAB colors.
957 patch letter size target iSis scans are in. I printed and made profiles for Plat glossy:
1. PSP w/o color management
2. I1Profiler direct
3. ACPU
4. Null transform (PS)

Ave dE between any two profiles varied from .15 to .25.  This is within normal variation in scanning separate but identically printed, prints. Max dE (in the 100,000 random RGB sets) was 1.1.

Then "calibrated" using Plat glossy and ran targets:
5. PSP w/o color management
6. Null transform.

These matched each other within .4 dE. So clearly the "calibration" is being echoed to the native device driver. Thus, selecting Plat Pro Glossy in PSP or direct to the driver from Photoshop should produce equally good results. At least for color management.

However, they differed from 1-4 significantly with an ave dE of 1.2 and max dE on a long tail reaching to 7.0. Examining the two profiles showed a close match except in the dark (L*<20) magenta region where sets 1-4 diverged significantly from 5-6.

Comments:
One can create a custom paper setting and calibrate it using one of the standard paper types but not generic ones like the 2000 and up printers. However, the custom type only shows up in the standard driver, and not in PSP.  That's just strange.

I'm curious as the how accurate the canned Plat Pro profiles are and how much (if any) they are improved by the "calibration" process. I don't yet see an advantage to the "calibration" process per se. The neutral curves change a little but only in the midrange by about 2 dE. Black points and smoothness are the same. My take is that if you are doing your own profiles there may be no advantage to using the calibration process at all unless you have multiple printers and wish to just create profiles with one and use them on all the others. It should produce closer print results. Possibly of some value after a head change or using aging ink. Presumably, a calibration on a one of the papers that adjusts globally would be almost as good as making new profiles and uses only one piece of paper.

Also of note is that the a* and b* on the neutral axis are smooth and well behaved. Much better than the 9800 which takes a lot of work (lots of target patches) to bring their variation below 1.0

Next: Compare the effect of calibration on color print accuracy by printing in gamut LAB patches using Abs. Col.
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Panagiotis

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #11 on: February 16, 2019, 04:19:02 pm »

The profiles all showed excellent gamut edge characteristics with very smooth, not ratty edges across the full range of L* slices. Much cleaner than my 9800 or 9500II.  Black L* was good ranging from 2.8 to 3.0. Gamut volume was good as well.

Profiles all tested against each other by creating a set of 100,000 random RGB values, applying them to the profile's device space, and running them through the AtoB1 tables to produce the estimated LAB colors.
957 patch letter size target iSis scans are in. I printed and made profiles for Plat glossy:
1. PSP w/o color management
2. I1Profiler direct
3. ACPU
4. Null transform (PS)

Ave dE between any two profiles varied from .15 to .25.  This is within normal variation in scanning separate but identically printed, prints. Max dE (in the 100,000 random RGB sets) was 1.1.

Then "calibrated" using Plat glossy and ran targets:
5. PSP w/o color management
6. Null transform.

These matched each other within .4 dE. So clearly the "calibration" is being echoed to the native device driver. Thus, selecting Plat Pro Glossy in PSP or direct to the driver from Photoshop should produce equally good results. At least for color management.

However, they differed from 1-4 significantly with an ave dE of 1.2 and max dE on a long tail reaching to 7.0. Examining the two profiles showed a close match except in the dark (L*<20) magenta region where sets 1-4 diverged significantly from 5-6.

Comments:
One can create a custom paper setting and calibrate it using one of the standard paper types but not generic ones like the 2000 and up printers. However, the custom type only shows up in the standard driver, and not in PSP.  That's just strange.

I'm curious as the how accurate the canned Plat Pro profiles are and how much (if any) they are improved by the "calibration" process. I don't yet see an advantage to the "calibration" process per se. The neutral curves change a little but only in the midrange by about 2 dE. Black points and smoothness are the same. My take is that if you are doing your own profiles there may be no advantage to using the calibration process at all unless you have multiple printers and wish to just create profiles with one and use them on all the others. It should produce closer print results. Possibly of some value after a head change or using aging ink. Presumably, a calibration on a one of the papers that adjusts globally would be almost as good as making new profiles and uses only one piece of paper.

Also of note is that the a* and b* on the neutral axis are smooth and well behaved. Much better than the 9800 which takes a lot of work (lots of target patches) to bring their variation below 1.0

Next: Compare the effect of calibration on color print accuracy by printing in gamut LAB patches using Abs. Col.

Thanks for the information. Your investigation is very interesting. Which version of PSP did you use?
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Doug Gray

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #12 on: February 16, 2019, 04:55:37 pm »

Thanks for the information. Your investigation is very interesting. Which version of PSP did you use?

Ver. 2.2.3

Just ran across another problem. PSP only offers Perceptual and Relative Colorimetric when using an ICC profile. Also, where's BPC option ins PSP? That's pretty useful with Rel. Col.

What's up with that? Where's Abs. and Sat.???

I use Abs. to provide a secondary verification color management is closing the loop. It's also pretty important for replication work.

While there's a lot to like about PSP what the actual printer settings are less than clear. Going directly through the driver is much cleaner to me. Also, PSP appears to use the OS's CMM and I prefer Adobe ACE for CMM though I haven't seen much difference between the two with printer profiles, unlike RGB matrix profiles which are can produce significant conversion errors with Windows' CMM.
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #13 on: February 16, 2019, 05:07:02 pm »

Strange. In the earlier version of PSP I reviewed it did offer Absolute Rendering Intent, if I remember correctly. It is essentially a GUI that reaches directly into the printer driver, so what you select there should also be the same thing as what you would select using the driver directly, the major difference being that the driver did not allow for turning colour management off, whereas PSP does.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Doug Gray

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #14 on: February 16, 2019, 05:26:10 pm »

Strange. In the earlier version of PSP I reviewed it did offer Absolute Rendering Intent, if I remember correctly. It is essentially a GUI that reaches directly into the printer driver, so what you select there should also be the same thing as what you would select using the driver directly, the major difference being that the driver did not allow for turning colour management off, whereas PSP does.

Difference between Windows and Mac or is it some issue with the current PSP or maybe option somewhere in PSP I'm missing?
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GWGill

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #15 on: February 16, 2019, 07:09:42 pm »

I don't yet see an advantage to the "calibration" process per se. The neutral curves change a little but only in the midrange by about 2 dE. Black points and smoothness are the same. My take is that if you are doing your own profiles there may be no advantage to using the calibration process at all unless you have multiple printers and wish to just create profiles with one and use them on all the others. It should produce closer print results. Possibly of some value after a head change or using aging ink. Presumably, a calibration on a one of the papers that adjusts globally would be almost as good as making new profiles and uses only one piece of paper.
In the DICENet/Colorbus RIPS, we implemented a per channel calibration system at the end of the profiled workflow, and while a lot of the benefit of that was with copier output, where it compensated for day to day variation in toner density mainly due to humidity changes, the benefits for the inkjet output was in allowing us to ship a profile for a particular model that would work well with whatever instance it ended up driving, and more usefully, it let one profile work well across different printer density modes. This saved an awful lot of profiling. For day to day use, re-calibrating was much more convenient that profiling, involving reading four strips with a strip reader. (For the copier there was an even faster method using the scanner that I developed, and was used extensively by our newspaper & magazine proofing customers)
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #16 on: February 16, 2019, 07:27:59 pm »

Difference between Windows and Mac or is it some issue with the current PSP or maybe option somewhere in PSP I'm missing?

I wouldn't know about a difference between Windows and OSX because I left the Windows world about ten years ago. In the PSP I worked with there were no hidden options. That was the whole point - all the settings one needed in the driver to make a print were laid-out very obviously to make it easy; so I'd be surprised if you are missing anything. In fact, the piece of the PSP Manual I found on-line suggests that there are only the two options: PSP Manual CM . This is truly annoying. They should definitely have ABSCOL available because it's necessary for those doing proofing work.   
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Doug Gray

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #17 on: February 16, 2019, 09:40:52 pm »

I wouldn't know about a difference between Windows and OSX because I left the Windows world about ten years ago. In the PSP I worked with there were no hidden options. That was the whole point - all the settings one needed in the driver to make a print were laid-out very obviously to make it easy; so I'd be surprised if you are missing anything. In fact, the piece of the PSP Manual I found on-line suggests that there are only the two options: PSP Manual CM . This is truly annoying. They should definitely have ABSCOL available because it's necessary for those doing proofing work.   

For sure Mark. Pretty bad for replication work as well. The remaining issue is if the Rel. Col. has BPC or not. Odd it isn't selectable.

Also, I've determined that the default (no calibration) profiles have a larger gamut in the dark violets, Hue angle about 280 - 300. at low L*.  This is the case on both matte and glossy. interesting.

For my purposes, I'm just going to profile based with the default settings. Exactly the same gamut except for those deep violets where the default wins out. So I'm going to stick with the same workflow that works quite well with my other two printers.

The Pro1000 does have materially more gamut overall than the 9800 or 9500II, especially at L* < 50, and a lower black point too. It's also much smoother so I don't need as many patches for a great profile.
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Doug Gray

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #18 on: February 16, 2019, 09:48:40 pm »

In the DICENet/Colorbus RIPS, we implemented a per channel calibration system at the end of the profiled workflow, and while a lot of the benefit of that was with copier output, where it compensated for day to day variation in toner density mainly due to humidity changes, the benefits for the inkjet output was in allowing us to ship a profile for a particular model that would work well with whatever instance it ended up driving, and more usefully, it let one profile work well across different printer density modes. This saved an awful lot of profiling. For day to day use, re-calibrating was much more convenient that profiling, involving reading four strips with a strip reader. (For the copier there was an even faster method using the scanner that I developed, and was used extensively by our newspaper & magazine proofing customers)
Yep. That's the great advantage that calibration should provide. But since calibration has produced smaller gamuts in the deep violets for this printer on both matte and glossy, I'm not going to bother with it. And since PSP is crippled in Windows (no Abs. Col.) that's not something I'm going to bother with either. Sad really, as I was expecting calibration to at least not decrease gamut and provide a good way to adjust for head wear or aging ink. Color me surprised.

But let me not be too negative. It's a very good printer. Some other tests suggest better resolution. particularly where small areas are light compared to the surround. This shows up on the dark circuit board in the upper left of the Kodak PDI image. More testing to do but from initial results I expect color accuracy to be quite good.

I'm going to make a scanner profile (adjusted for large area crosstalk). I expect they will be as good or better than my other printers and the scanner profile's gamut should benefit from  the larger printer gamut as well.
« Last Edit: February 16, 2019, 09:53:51 pm by Doug Gray »
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Pro 1000 Color Management Investigation
« Reply #19 on: February 16, 2019, 09:59:09 pm »

..........

The Pro1000 does have materially more gamut overall than the 9800 or 9500II, especially at L* < 50, and a lower black point too. It's also much smoother so I don't need as many patches for a great profile.

Useful to remember that the Epson 9800/9500 are quite dated by now. The Pro-1000 incorporates all of Canon's newest printer and ink technology in a series that was thoroughly re-engineered. It also produces visibly superior prints compared with Canon's own previous models.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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