Canon Pro 4100 - Color Calibration

[William Walker]

Hi,

After nine years my Canon iPF8400 has become unreliable and I have ordered a new Canon Pro 4100.

The new machine is still "on the water" and I should have it in about a month.

This from the manual:-
"Color calibration improves color consistency by compensating for slight differences in how color appears when printing due to individual variations or aging among the printers.
Executing color calibration will print a test pattern (built into the printer) that is then read automatically by the printer.
By this operation, calibration adjustment values reflecting the print result of the test pattern are set automatically."

A video, if I understand it correctly, says that ICC profiles can be created from this.

How similar is this to creating paper profiles the usual way?

I would appreciate as much help here as possible because I can't find any solid information other than the above quote!

Many thanks,
William.

[John Hollenberg]

Same calibration as the ipf 8400:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymGlcTVQxww

This gets your printer in a known state prior to profiling.  You do the calibration (using the same paper each time) when printer is new, after installing a new head or if the machine has drifted over time, which assures that your profile will still work optimally.

[William Walker]

Same calibration as the ipf 8400:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymGlcTVQxww

This gets your printer in a known state prior to profiling.  You do the calibration (using the same paper each time) when printer is new, after installing a new head or if the machine has drifted over time, which assures that your profile will still work optimally.

Thanks John! I get it...somehow I got the idea that it was more than that! 

[mcpix]

I once did this on my 8300 when the prints started to look a little lighter than I thought they should be. I debated about running a new profile, but simply running the calibration made everything look good again.

You might want to cancel your order as Canon just announced a new 4600 printer.

[William Walker]

You might want to cancel your order as Canon just announced a new 4600 printer.

Just what I was afraid of!
Thanks for that!

[alain]

Oh I ordered a pro-2100 this Thursday evening.

Not going to cancel it, I expect a big price hike to the price.

[CharlesGast]

 I'm using a z3100 on its last legs and will most likely go to the pro-2100 or 2600 series in the spring or summer.
The HP was very nice since I had the APS (advanced profiling solution) to create profiles using the printer.

Does the Canon pro-2100/4100 actually create profiles and read them with a built-in spectrophotometer?

I see references to color calibration but I have not seen a picture of a profile patch target printout to provide clues.

[aaronleitz]

The Canon 4100 does not have a built-in spectrophotometer.

[CharlesGast]

Interesting that Canon say that it calibrates color by printing a pattern.
If there's no spectro, then there's no profile creation possible.
It might measure reflectivity for a minimal calibration?

[aaronleitz]

A good thread on the difference between the Canon's built-in densitometer and a spectrophotometer:

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4535471

[CharlesGast]

aaronleitz,
Thank you for that link!
I'm spoiled by having an old Z3100 with a built in SpectroPhotometer along with the APS option which is used for both Calibration - which is a small patch count target read by the Spectro and remains in the printer - and the ability to generate a 925 patch target which provides a superior ICC profile.
The canned profiles from media providers which were printed on the same model as my printer, but were not printed on my individual printer always missed the mark. Sometimes they were way off. This is old news for us here.
The device in the Canon printers can't be a densitometer since that measures light transmission through the media. Back in the 90's I used a densitometer to check exposure of X-ray films, and it could also be used for cine film negatives.
 The device in the Canon printers must be reflectometer which measures reflectance of the ink patches. Canon can say that calibrates color, but that's a stretch from my perspective.
Even the Z9+ which retained the spectro had the firmware modified sometime after initial Z9's were shipped to only use 400 patches and no options to make a larger patch target so I'm not buying that.
HP stopped making the red ink and Matte Black- Red printheads for the Z3100 earlier this year.  The HP rep I spoke with talked in circles when I asked, but I suspect they'll pull the plug on the Z3200 supplies sometime this year or next.

Canon touts the new LUCIA PRO II  ink set in the soon to be released 2600/4600 series. "New inks substantially improve scratch resistance. Very light-resistant pigments dramatically increase color fastness, with prints that can be preserved for 200 years".
 Maybe. Hopefully Wilhelm analyses the performance so we have more details beyond marketing hype -  but so far I'm not impressed by the addition of a new ink channel referred to as 'Fluorescent Pink'. 

[ColourPhil]

aaronleitz,
The device in the Canon printers can't be a densitometer since that measures light transmission through the media. Back in the 90's I used a densitometer to check exposure of X-ray films, and it could also be used for cine film negatives.
 The device in the Canon printers must be reflectometer which measures reflectance of the ink patches. Canon can say that calibrates color, but that's a stretch from my perspective.

There are, or were, devices known as 'Reflection Densitometers', which measured the density of prints, etc. through red, green and blue colour filters. Were very common in press rooms before the advent of spectrophotometers.

[widmark]

Canon touts the new LUCIA PRO II  ink set in the soon to be released 2600/4600 series. "New inks substantially improve scratch resistance. Very light-resistant pigments dramatically increase color fastness, with prints that can be preserved for 200 years".
 Maybe. Hopefully Wilhelm analyses the performance so we have more details beyond marketing hype -  but so far I'm not impressed by the addition of a new ink channel referred to as 'Fluorescent Pink'. 

That's just the GP models, the versions for "graphics" and advertising. The non-GP versions have the same 11 colors plust optimizer as the previous models. Newly formulated though.

[Lessbones]

There are, or were, devices known as 'Reflection Densitometers', which measured the density of prints, etc. through red, green and blue colour filters. Were very common in press rooms before the advent of spectrophotometers.

Reflection densitometers are very much still around-- I have a few handheld ones, some that do just strict density, and some that have CMY filters for press usage.  What CharlesGast is referring to is a "transmission densitometer".  There are also emissive densitometers, like the sensors inside of a colorimeter (like an i1d3) which are each behind specific filters and receive illumination from an external source.  Any photocell or photoresistor becomes a densitometer as soon as you put something in between it and a light source (although it's much more useful if it responds with a known response curve)  From what i've observed of the Canon system, it uses individual RGB LEDs instead of filtering a single light source.  I personally have never been convinced of the system's usefulness-- I've never had a situation in which I was able to return to a known condition through simply running an on-printer calibration without also having to make a new ICC profile, so for the most part I turn it off.  It also has a very unintuitive system of "common" vs. "individual" calibrations, where certain media types can be used to calibrate all other media types, but for some media types the calibration is only valid for that one media...  It gets pretty sloppy pretty quickly if you're making your own profiles and using non-Canon media (who tf uses Canon media...)

this site has an extremely detailed and helpful explanation of how the whole thing works, but I must confess I haven't read it completely myself:  https://www.the-ninth.com/blog/canon-printer-calibration-guide