Musings on Photography

Because I’m switching to the HP Z3100 for all my printing, I’ve been engaged in that soul-sucking pastime, the Paper Chase. But, before I start off trying lots of papers at random, I’m trying to a) lay down a methodology so that I can be both thorough and consistent, b) make part of that methodology be to tie the result on the new printer back to the results on the old printer, and c) be directed about what papers I try.

And the key, I think, is to exploit the information that’s collected when a paper is profiled. I have both prints and profiles for several papers on the Epson 9600, and those prints and the profiles for the papers they’re on represent a lot of data. The profiles, for instance, can tell you a lot about the gamut of a printer/paper combination.

Here’s just such a comparison - comparing Epson Enhanced Matte and Epson Ultrasmooth, both on the Epson 9600.

The wireframe represents the gamut of Epson Enhanced Matte on the 9600, the solid is the gamut of Epson Ultrasmooth. The thing to note is that Ultrasmooth Fine Art has a smaller gamut everywhere except for the dark blues. Everywhere the difference in gamut is pretty small. This pretty much matches my experience using these two papers fairly extensively on the Epson 9600. The two papers have differ in base color and surface texture and weight, but images print similarly on both papers once the base color difference is discounted.

Now let’s look at one paper on the two different printers. For convenience, I’ll use Epson Ultrasmooth Fine Art.

Wireframe is the 9600, solid is the z3100. The 9600 has a modestly larger gamut in the darker yellowy-greens and oranges. The z3100 has big wins in the greens and blues. Note that the differences on the same paper but between the two printers are large relative to the differences between Epson Enhanced Matte and Epson Ultrasmooth both on the 9600. The thing I notice is that the 9600 wins pretty much all around right down near the maximum black. Again, all this pretty much matches my impressions comparing prints on Ultrasmooth on both printers.

One thing I’ve noticed is that Ultrasmooth and Epson Enhanced Matte seem to have been tweaked to work well on the Epson printers - no surprise, I suppose. But both papers seem to perform better on the 9600 than they do on the z3100.

But look at this comparison - Crane Museo Max on the z3100 (wireframe) against Epson Ultrasmooth on the z3100 (solid)

Crane Museo Max gives a much larger gamut on the 3100 than Ultrasmooth Fine Art. As a general thing, this matches my observations from comparison prints. So I’m feeling pretty good about being able to look at the comparison of these profiles and make inferences about what the papers will be like when compared.

Now, the tool I’m using to generate these graphics is the colorsync tool on the Mac. It has the big advantage that I can ‘grab’ the graphic and rotate it around to my hearts content. This interactivity means that making comparisons is a lot easier than it seems looking at these static graphics. One particularly useful trick is to rotate the plot so that you’re looking edge on at a particular area you want to examine - this lets you see the ‘thickness’ of the difference between the two gamuts and so get some idea of whether this is a minor difference or a major one.