I've been trying to figure out how to get an HP 5500ps wide format printer to output a 21step sRGB grayramp the same as it appears on my calibrated display using the WinXP HP driver and the media profiles loaded and accessed only through the printer's front panel.
I can't bypass these profiles and most render the grayramp as dark murky orangish brown, others render coolish cyan but all plug-up shadows to black up to 30,30,30RGB level with 240 highlites looking 200. Forget color matching.
Researching the web on this model I've come across so many conflicting user experiences on how to get color matched prints all methods costing more than the printer itself outside of converting in Photoshop to the downloadable HP canned ICC profiles.
One says to linearize and optimize the response before measuring and building a custom profile by choosing the correct front panel media profile. How can you get a decently made profile measuring from this crappy response? Won't the gamut be compromized?
Then this got me to second guess my own understanding of what linear, non-linear and to linearize/optimize means. A DCRAW site FAQ explained that a linear response was suppose to look dark and non-linear to look as the human eye sees an image-normal=not dark, but I'm at loss as to what linearize is suppose to look like. Or is linearize and optimize two different things?
This concept also applies to display calibration where you want the native response to look as close to sRGB as possible by adjusting presets to resemble 2.2 gamma before you measure and build the profile. I thought this was called linearizing. Now I'm not sure.
