Upgrade Progress

So today, after puttering away at the upgrade process on the Mac Pro an hour here, and hour there, I finally got it all working. The solution, for those who actually care, was to go through the various upgrade paths offered for Mac OS X 10.5, taking slightly different paths each time, until I got to a path that worked. This required wiping the main hard disk and starting over from scratch several times, which is why it was done in dribs and drabs, an hour or so at a time. Each time I got some part started, I’d go outside, enjoy the nice weather, and play with the dog.

In the end the path that worked consisted of doing a clean install on the drive, using the ‘migrate’ feature at the end of the install to move all the apps and files (but NOT system settings, etc.) and then use software update to update EVERYTHING POSSIBLE. Then I ran the HP installer, added the printer, and it all worked. There was a moment of fear when I ran Photoshop and it went through the registration, but to my utter amazement the registration WORKED.

Whew. The whole thing felt a lot like cleanup after a big storm. Well, except I got to play with the dog a lot. I highly recommend enlisting the help of a dog in defusing the stress induced by such an upgrade. Without Kodak’s help, I’d be a basket case.

The Second Update Weekend (in which our hero makes modest progress)

This weekend, like last weekend, will be at least in part dedicated to making progress on getting Macs upgraded to 10.5. Bear in mind that the problems so far have nothing to do with getting the Macs upgraded (said upgrade being a smooth process) but with getting the HP Z3100 working smoothly on the upgraded machine.

I have now fallen back to the least desirable path, which is to make a clean install of 10.5 on the Mac Pro, and then get the printer working, and then reinstall all the applications. The big problem will be reinstalling Photoshop, because I will have to jump through the phone call hoops to get Photoshop re-registered.

No Joy

I called HP. The phone numbers they gave me got me connected to the right person almost right away. With him guiding, we went through most of the steps I’d tried (always good to make sure I didn’t miss something simple), and then made an attempt to clean things up manually and install. It was an heroic effort.

However, there is no joy in Tranquility, Mighty Casey has struck out. The phone call ended with the HP guy recommending that I call Apple. I have a theory: when you’re working out a problem with Company A’s problem, and they recommend that you get Company B to fix it, you are well and truly shafted, because when you call Company B, they are quite naturally going to be motivated to get you to go back to company A for help.

The machine is now running Tiger (10.4) off the dupe of the main disk. When I get another block of time, I’ll try doing a clean install of 10.5 on a disk, and then ‘importing’ everything, which a couple people have encouraged me to try. If that doesn’t work, I’ll do a clean install of 10.5 and re-install all the working software. That’ll require a call to Adobe to get the licensing straightened out.

To answer a few questions:

“If it works don’t fix it. Why did you think you needed to upgrade?”

I’m doing the upgrade because I want all the machines I use and have to administer to be running the same software. In a networked environment, there are compelling reasons to run Leopard instead of Tiger.

“Was something not working the way you wanted it to? have you not got a backup program capable of making a system backup (perhaps on a cd in form of an iso file) in case things go awry?”

Sure, I’ve got backups. No data has been lost. I’m still running, almost exactly where I started, and I can get back to exactly where I started with very little effort. That’s not the frustration. The frustration is that the upgrade hasn’t been successful but many hours have been invested and thus wasted. I have a finite lifespan, and I can’t get those hours back.

“And why keep doing business with people who hate you and think you suck — unless you agree with their estimation?”

The odds that I’ll continue to do business with HP diminish rapidly and monotonically. They have a competitor (Epson), and that competitor makes excellent products and (in my experience) offers support that ranges from good to incredibly good. The next printer I buy will probably be an Epson, probably after the next round of product revisions.

As for Adobe – that’s a good question. I’ve looked at other editing programs, and in my personal estimation, looking at photo editing software as a tool strictly for my own use, Photoshop still has compelling advantages. The gap between Photoshop and the closest competitors once seemed insurmountable. I think, though, that the gap is closing, and I think it’s closing pretty swiftly.

I think Adobe are now at a point where the fundamental feature set of the product is mature, and they’ve gone through enough times that they’ve polished out the rough edges. Their model (layers) is powerful and flexible. But their model is not the only possible model, and other competitors will come along and try to eat Photoshop’s business.

And I will be watching those competitors closely.

Printing Fatigue

I’ll offer up a word of explanation on the printing fatigue issue I mentioned (and which has drawn several comments).

This past summer, Hewlett Packard invited me to be part of the beta test program for their new printer, the HP z3200. They sent me a printer. I set it up in my work space, right next to my z3100. They let me use it. In exchange, I did a lot of printing on the z3200, and I told them what I thought about the printer.

It would seem that such arrangements would be mutually beneficial, but I didn’t find it to be too positive from my end. Beyond dealing with the usual bureaucratic nonsense that you expect to come with such stuff (which I got in spades), what it mostly did was cause me to spend a lot of time evaluating printers and printer software, and not much time with actually making the prints I really wanted to get made.

Worse, I got sick of the whole thing. Sick of printers, and printer problems. Sick of looking at prints. Sick of struggling with beta software that broke in ways that just wasted time. Sick of trying to help people thousands of miles away figure out what was broken. Sick of another printer making loud noise in my studio, driving me crazy.

So there’s that part of the overall printing fatigue. But that’s not all.

There’s also the observation that lately I’ve been spending more time with the camera, and less time in the lightroom endlessly tweaking images. Sure, I still give half a dozen images a month the full treatment. But I’m making more photographs now than ever before – disk storage is becoming a concern again – and I’m finding enjoyment in different parts of the photographic process.

There was a time when I looked at prints I’d made, and looking at the prints made me want to go back into the darkroom, and see how I could improve those prints. These days, when I look at prints (or even look at a set of photos on my monitor, or on the flatscreen TV) I’m finding that it doesn’t make me want to go back to the computer and make more photoshop tweaks.

What happens now is that I look at the photos, and I see patterns emerge among the images. I see trends in the photographs that become more clear as I examine them in various ways and in various orders. And when I see new trends or new patterns or new ideas, it makes me want to pick up the camera, go out into the world, and see what happens next. It’s as if I’m writing a story, and I don’t know what comes next. I want to find out what comes next, and the only way to do that is to make the next photos.

My love affair with prints is not over. I’m not selling all the printers (although if someone wants a deal on an Epson 9600, by all means let me know and we’ll work out a deal). I’m just observing that I have, in the past, swung back and forth between interest in printing and interest in photographing, and right now that pendulum has, for a host of reasons, swung rather far over to the photographing side.

z3100 sleep mode, more info

Tom Quinn dropped me another email, this time suggesting that the reason the z3100 was never going into sleep mode was that software running on his mac was keeping it awake. Tom suggested testing this by unplugging my z3100 from my network.

I gave it a try. The printer went to sleep.

I will run a few more experiments based on this info, I think.

UPDATE: Tom says that his theory is that if you uncheck ‘monitor’ in the printer monitor preferences, that will let the printer sleep. He also reports that when asleep, the printer consumes 22 watts, and he feels that’s rather high (I agree). When turned off but plugged in, he reports, the printer consumes 2 watts.

z3100 power usage

Just this morning I got an interesting email from Tom Quinn, who wrote:

I seem to have a very similar printer history and wondered if you would answer a question? I have owned these Epson printers 3000,5500,4000,7600,9600,10000 and now an HP Z3100.

My question concerns power use age and the dreaded fan noise. When the printer is switched off and still plugged in power usage is about 2 watts. After turning the printer on power usage goes up to about 40 watts.

My problem is the lack of ever going into sleep mode. Sleep mode has been set for the default 30 minutes.

The display, green power button, fan and power usage do not change over the entire day.

How does your printer indicate when it is in sleep mode?

It turns out that my z3100, which used to politely enter ‘sleep’ mode and dim the display, no longer does. Like Tom, I’ve fiddled around with the sleep mode timer, to no avail.

My attention was distracted from this problem because for the past few months but as the weather turns colder and I spend more time in the studio, I had just noticed it again.

I’m guessing that it’s some problem with a newer firmware upgrade. Anyone know anything about this? If you have a z3100 it would be interesting to know if your printer’s behavior matches Tom’s and mine, and if your printer’s standby behavior has changed.

Unsurprisingly, Tom’s email response from HP is that they’ve haven’t got a clue. Given recent experiences as part of a beta test program for an HP printer, I am doubtful that anyone at HP would notice if the standby behavior changed across a firmware upgrade.

But whatever. If you’ve got info, even if it’s just to see if your printer does what ours do, chime in in the comments, please

Printer Comparisons

It’s taken me quite some time to get things here stable enough, but at long last I’m to the point where I can make prints on two of the printers I have access to currently, and compare them.

It seems like this should be an easy task. You fire up Photoshop, and you send off a print to printer A. Then, from the same file, you send off a print to printer B. And when both prints are done, you compare them side by side, and you note any differences.

But in the real world, it’s never this easy.

There’s the little matter of getting profiles that show off the paper being used to its best, on each printer. In a world bounded by truth and justice, this would be easy. In the admittedly inferior world that I inhabit, just figuring out what the best possible options for each printer are is a big problem. Options are often named similarly but don’t have the same real effect, so it’s not just a matter of matching names. It’s a big honking exploration of N dimensional space. For each printer.

And then there are all the OTHER issues. Sharpening – sharpen the same for both printers? Or do you optimize for each printer independently? Rendering intent? The list is tiresomely long.

But I have made a few simplifying assumptions, and I have beaten the profile thing into a lumpy mess on the floor, and I have just now made two prints – one on each printer. And I have taken the prints, and put them on the wall. The first thing I discovered is that the lighting isn’t quite the same on each print. So I will have to fix that with a more permanent solution that the cobbled up trick I currently am using.

But the bottom line is that the prints are ALMOST the same. They’re close enough that at first glance, they look the same. And then as you gaze in loving adoration at each in turn, the subtle differences start to become apparent.

This is good news. I have two printers, and they’re producing different results even though I have controlled all the variables I can think of. That result, in and of itself, is progress of a significant sort.

Now I just need some process to decide which is better. I think I can hear the sound of printers running non-stop, just in the near future of the next week or so.

I’m glad I ordered up a big pile of paper.

Printer Crash

I’ve gotten little done this afternoon. I got sidetracked trying to figure out why my laptop (recently upgraded to OS X 10.5 ‘Leopard’) didn’t see my z3100.

After considerable fiddling about with network hubs, replacement network hubs, etc. it finally occurred to me to see if my desktop machine could see the printer. Ah, that’s actually hard to tell. Fiddling about with the HP apps to control the printer led to every attempt to launch the various apps resulting in the same app (Printer Utility) launching. Hmm.

So I went to the printer, and thought “I’ll just see if the PRINTER thinks it can see the network. And it said it was trying to get a DHCP address. Hmm.

Power printer down. Power printer back up. It launches into it’s power up calisthenics, complete with checking the filesystem for the disk in the printer. Hmm. Not normal. Apparently my printer crashed.

It takes a surprisingly long time for a z3100 to boot, especially if it has to run fsck on the filesystem.

As God is my witness, I am not a luddite. I have steadfastly advocated for improved technology in the world of photography. But when I can’t make progress on photography because my damn printer had a seizure, and it takes half an hour for it to power off and power back up, it makes me want to say really rude words.

Loudly.

Frustration

I wasted much of this morning, foolishly pursuing trying to profile sheets of paper in the z3100, all to no avail. First I tried Epson Premium Luster, whacking off sheets from a 44″ roll I have left over. I can get it to calibrate fine. It barfs when trying to scan the printed profile test pattern, complaining about “paper type/LED”.

So, thinking it as a major printer problem, I reprofiled another paper, this one a roll. Worked a treat.

I tried just having the printer scan the Epson Premium Luster prints. No dice, same error.

Finally, just to find out if it’s a problem with the Epson paper or a sheet problem, I tried to have the printer scan the test print I generated on the other paper. No dice, same error.

This will have to wait until I have the fortitude to call up HP and do battle with phone support. With my frustration level already high, it will have to wait.

This is a disappointment, because I’d been hoping to be able to ask people to send me, say, three or four a3 sized sheets of various papers, and I’d profile them and blog about the results. Sheesh, if I can’t profile using sheets I guess that won’t work. Even putting sheets in and telling the printer it’s a roll won’t work because it does different stuff to de-skew the paper.

Rats.

Chase for a Daily Paper

No, not the daily paper as in the Wall Street Journal. That sort of paper is read online, thanks, where I don’t end up with lots of trash afterwards.

I’m talking about a search for a paper which can be my ‘daily user’ printing paper – the cheaper stuff I make work prints on so that I work through the process of editing and adjusting the photos without burning up huge quantities of cash on expensive stuff like Crane Museo Portfolio. I mean, Crane Museo Portfolio is lovely stuff, and all other things being equal, I’d print on nothing else (until I find something better).

But all things are most definitely NOT equal. In particular, a 17″ x 50′ roll of CMP costs (the lowest price I’ve been able to find) $130. In contrast, my previous daily paper (Epson Enhance Matte) cost $52 for a 17″ x 100′ roll. Yes, that’s right, CMP costs a factor of five more. And when you’re planning on making a lot of prints, a little economy goes a long way but a big economy puts you outside the gravitational influence of the Sun.

So the search is on for some daily paper. One option would be to use Epson Enhanced Matte, because it’s cheap.

One candidate I’ve found so far is InkjetArt’s Premium Duobrite Matte. It’s priced on a par with Epson Enhanced Matte – $52 for a 17″x100′ roll. Shipping is cheap. Sounds good, so I ordered a roll.

At first blush, the stuff looks and feels nice. The base color is colder than EEM, which is not my preference. But it’s ok, and it comes in whacking big rolls on a 3″ core, which means that it doesn’t have as much curl as some other inexpensive papers that come on 2″ cores.

So I profiled it. Here’s one comparison – InkJetArt Premium Duobrite Matte (solid) and Crane Museo Portfolio (wireframe):

Well, it’s nice to know that paying five times more gets you substantially better performance. InkJetArt Duobrite Matte scraps out some very minimal wins in the lighter tones, and gives up HUGE losses in the lower values.

Now, to my eye, it looks to me as if the differences here should make a profound difference in prints. What I really need, I guess, is a way to not just compare the two profiles (which might reveal differences between the gamut) but also a way to see how the differences in gamuts alter the rendered image. Such software exists. I suppose this represents another divergence from making photographs as I scurry down the hallways of color theory and software tools. Sigh.

Now, just for yucks, I compared InkJetArt Duobrite Matte to Epson Ultrasmooth Fine Art:

I haven’t shown you the reverse side of the graphic, because the two gamuts are identical, or at least so nearly identical that it makes no difference.

And now for the instructive comparison, InkJetArt Duobrite Matte(wireframe) and Epson Enhanced Matte (solid):

Looking at yesterday’s post, we saw that Epson Enhanced Matte has a gamut the same general shape as Epson Ultrasmooth, but just a smidgen larger.

And yet on the z3100, Ultrasmooth and InkjetArt Premium Duobrite Matte have almost exactly the same gamut, and yet InkjetArt Premium Duobrite Matte and Epson Enhanced Matte are pretty radically different, with EEM winning substantially in the dark tones and giving up lots of ground on the high tones.

There is no transitivity here. The fact that paper A outperforms paper B on one printer tells you next to nothing about the relative performance of A and B on a different printer.

How annoying. I guess there ain’t nothing easy.