Further to post #38 in this thread I have now finished testing the Print module in Photoshop CS3 using Windows XP Pro SP2, and I regret to report that it is thoroughly defective - and for my purposes unusable. I have two printers - an HP business inkjet for non-photographic printing, and an Epson 4800 for photographic printing. The HP is the default printer because it gets used more routinely.
(1) Each time I bring up a new image to print, it defaults to the HP printer rather than keeping the Epson 4800 active as long as Photoshop is kept open. With CS2, once the Epson 4800 was selected for the first print, that printer remained selected until Photoshop was shut down. This is logical. CS3 does not respect this logical convention, creating a major interference with batch printing.
(2) Otherwise, all one's colour management and Epson driver settings are retained as one had specified them from image to image and from one Photoshop session to another, except for the orientation of the paper.
(3) The Photoshop CS3 print command cannot automatically center a print no matter what I do with it. The problem is very severe if in the Epson driver one has "Centered" selected in the Paper tab. I turned this feature off in the Epson driver, and that improved but did not rectify the centering problem in the CS3 Print window. (In CS2 it is not necessary to disable "Centered" - in fact to get centered prints one selects it - as one would expect, while at the same time Photoshop is managing colors.) By turning "Centered" off in the Epson driver using CS3, the left and right borders are approximately equal, but the top and bottom ones are not, whether one is printing Landscape or Portrait. To equalize the top and bottom borders, it is necessary to deselect Center in the CS3 Print window, and manually tweak the "top" amount of inches until it looks centered in the preview window. This of course is completely unsatisfactory for an efficient workflow and represents a major reduction of application functionality compared with CS2.
It would appear to me that Adobe was trying to improve the management of print settings by centralizing all the necessary adjustments in one window, as one finds in some RIPs, however regardless of the good intentions, my evidence suggests that this effort was botched, inadequately tested before release, and goes down the same road as many other good intentions, for those who know the expression.
(4) What makes matters even worse, is that once my image is "processed" through the CS3 Print module, some instructions stick to it that prevent me from being able to get a centered print in CS2 as well. Hence, anyone using the CS3 Print Module at least for an Epson 4800 printer on a Windows XP O/S needs to be aware of the risk that running images through this module will cause permanent impairment of automatic print centering for all such images. To be sure this is clearly understood, let me clarify, that as long as an image has not been contaminated by the Photoshop CS3 Print module, I can open it in CS2 and print it properly centered, automatically in the usual way I did before CS3 ever appeared on my computer. As soon as I process the image through the CS3 Print module, this functionality evaporates in both CS3 and CS2. Therefore until this problem is remedied in CS3, the only safe way to retain automated printing functionality is to close the images once adjusted in CS3, and re-open them in CS2 for printing.
Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that insofar as other users similarly equipped (Epson driver and Windows XP) experience the same issues, PSCS3 was released prematurely with inadequate testing in respect of this very important function. It is now incumbent on Adobe to repair both these defects (retaining the selected printer through a Photoshop session, and automatic accurate print centering) as soon as they possibly can. It is indeed hard to understand how such sophisticated companies with their minions of testers and QC people produce these screw-ups, but there we have it.