Hope to hear from someone who has used the CO and the results you can get with it very soon.
Are we able to turn it on/off whenever we wish?
Stephen
HP makes the Gloss Enhancer (GE) an optional channel because some folks only print on matte media and don't need it. If you wish to install it you buy the GE kit which comes with 300ml GE cartridge, USB stick w/softare to upgrade the printer firmware for GE, and a new print head. If you elect to install the GE Kit at the very beginning when you first initialize the printer, make sure to install the GE cartridge at the very beginning and follow the prompts to install the GE. Then the original print head will be used and you will be able to keep the print head which comes in the kit as a universal spare. That's a cool feature of the Z9+. Once operational the GE can indeed be turned on and off at your user discretion, but I don't see any options for different ways to lay it down. No econo mode versus full coat coverage. That said, The Z9+ lays down GE very sensibly. It does cleacoat image white areas but doesn't extend to paper margin areas like some printers do when using an "overall" mode. If you want page margins with clear coat, just add a white border into the image.
I will share with all of you, an amusing story with my new Z9+. I started using the Z9+ with a cheap roll of Glossy RC media to get familiar with it, and I noticed the color profile patch chart printed the GE into the image white areas because I'd chosen a custom media preset option to use the GE. Yet when I started printing real images, my first impression was that the printer had now defaulted to an "economy mode" where the GE was not being laid down into the pure white areas. I couldn't figure out what setting I'd missed in the driver, but otherwise, I had the impression the GE must be getting used because the glossy prints I was making have very little bronzing, not perfect, but very low and essentially what Epson achieves without use of a GO channel on its WF printers. Well, it turns out the GE feature is checked "off" by default in the printer driver, and the printer was not using the GE at all! I missed it because the HP driver locates the checkbox for GE in a very odd place. It's under the "color options" menu (at least in the Mac version of driver), which is a lame place to put it because typical printer driver practice for most printers is that anyone who uses application managed color (such as with photoshop or LR), the color option menu is never used. It's only used when one is following a "printer manages color" workflow. The "paper/quality" menu option is thus the logical place to locate a gloss enhancer/optimizer setting. It just didn't occur to me to look for the GE "on/off" checkbox in that location in the driver. I assumed that the custom media preset had "baked" in the GE ON mode, but that's not correct. It did when producing the ICC Profile, but to use the feature when actually printing, you have to check the box located under the color option menu. The tip off came when all else failed and I read the manual!
But even the manual only took note that a checkbox for on/off was available. It doesn't say where you will find it in the driver! Once I figured this out (it took a lot of head scratching!) the GE coats the image like it does with the ICC color profile test chart, and all is well.
If you aren't too fussy about bronzing and differential gloss, you might just want to hold off and install the kit later (albeit you will need the spare print head from the kit), but if you are very picky about gloss differential and bronzing like I am, then you are going to want the GE kit. It does what it's designed to do, namely uniformize the gloss appearance and increase the "vividness" of the printed image colors on glossy and luster type photo media.
cheers,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com
