Epson America recently posted new Mac drivers for the 900 and 880 series printers at
www.proimaging.epson.com While the drivers were updated for Lion, they are fully backward compatible with Snow Leopard and Leopard.
Based on feedback, including some lively posts in this forum
the new drivers spell out the names of all the paper profiles vs. abbreviations.
For example, CPBWFAP MK v1 is now Cold_Press_Bright_MK_V1
There is one difference in the profile names to note:
If the full name of the printer is listed before the profile such as:
Epson Stylus Pro 9900_7900 PremiumLusterPhotoPaper260
This is a profile produced at Epson’s offices in Japan on papers that are designed for worldwide use. These profiles will be found on drivers throughout the world and in multiple languages.
If the name of the printer is shortened such as:
Epson SP7900_9900_Hot_Press_Natural_MK_V1
This is a profile generated at Epson America’s offices in California for papers that are designed and managed by Epson America.
Attached is a screen-grab showing, in this case, all the profiles for the Stylus Pro 7900/9900. I highlighted the Epson America generated profiles.
In addition, all the papers are now listed in the Media Type section of the driver. Attached is a screen-grab with one example showing Hot Press Bright selected as the Media Type. In drivers that do not have the name Hot Press Bright, the recommendation is to use the UltraSmooth Fine Art setting. While the UltraSmooth Fine Art Media Type setting works for Hot Press Bright, we felt that listing all the papers would help minimize confusion.
One other note, the Common Updater for many printers (with the latest OSX versions) will no longer be required. Over time, they will be removed from the driver support web pages.
Finally, be sure to remove the older driver before installing the new version. Driver installation does not automatically remove existing profiles and its possible to then have increased clutter with both the full names and the abbreviated names for the same profile.
I have to admit that I liked the abbreviations (or for some acronyms) but I was certainly in the minority on this one
We hope the full names of the profiles and having all the papers available in the Media Type section will make the workflow a bit more intuitive.
Dan (Dano) Steinhardt
Marketing Manager, Professional Imaging
Epson America, Inc.