Neil,
A variety of times (including the quote above, in your Z3100 review, and on an earlier "red matte" thread that I started)... you say that "on the Hahnemuhle Fine Art Smooth or Epson Enhanced matte the reds are good only slightly behind the K3 Epson printers". My experience is more like "significantly behind".
Since these are the two papers that I intended to use the most for landscapes... what are your suggestions of which media type to use (I tried the FA >250g/m for the HSFA without much luck), how to get a good profile, and whatever else might be good to know.
I am wondering when the "latest update to the APS profiling kit" was (I do not have APS). I would happily get someone to do the APS profiling (Ron sent me an APS one for EEM awhile back) or pay for a profile (have people tried this).
I would love to find out I am doing something wrong... so I could fix it. Rereading, I sound a bit aggressive... I do not mean to .
Thanks, Alan
P.S. My greens seem to have a bit too much gamut compared to Espon... something I expect to happily get used to!
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The Epson K3 inks are in every case going to fetch more density and more saturation in the darker reds than HP and surprisingly Canon, no doubt, and visibly better. By how much it depends on which red, how much transition, and the actual profile and rendering intent used. By looking at soft previews, looking at prints , and gamut boundaries the HP still prints a nice red on the papers listed. Let's be perfectly clear though, as this is not the case with rag papers or at least those I have tried.
I do think the reds are questionable with both the APS, and the built in profiler, neither being accurate , nor precise. For H Smooth FA APS is better overall, but the soft preview is of less quality than the actual print. If I could I would use Monaco or Argyll to make the profiles, but I haven't had the license for Monaco for too long, and Argyll is command line that I cannot use ( Unix illiterate). The latest APS corrected UI things and paper handling, but reds are not changed. I can't see a firmware changing reds once again, as although possible , every action has a reaction and all the other characteristics would also move, normally for the worse.
I spent a lot of time measuring, tweaking, recommending changes for the reds, which were first alerted here, yet before I had problems with transitions that were corrected before the printers were released. I can see that image specific characteristics can leave holes in a global perception of the situation. So it's a good thing that the issues are brought to light, and they can have differing opinions, based on which actual imagery is printed. The sad thing will be that then for some images the correlation will be fine, acceptable, or that the client will pay, or the opposite, which has consequences much more serious for everyone.
What still shocks me though is we never hear about the missing or lesser colour attributes on the Epson side when the users of HP and Canon are rejoicing in printing them. I still would like the perfect printer, one that does it all, and all well. Ideally, Epson Vivid magenta UC inks but with RGBadditional primaries, triple loading as Canon, and the built in spectro of the HP plus true r=g=b grey only of HP in a 18" form factor......