Musings on Photography

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.

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.

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.

In this post I had suggested that the Z3100 didn’t come with one year of on-site next business day warranty. I was wrong. The z3100 DOES come with one year of on-site NBD warranty coverage.

This got cleared up in my email exchange with Ben Wolf, the pro photo product manager for the Z series printers at HP. I’m not quite sure where my misunderstanding of the standard warranty coverage came from, but Ben clarified “the standard warranty is for Next Business Day response-which does not automatically include an onsite visit unless it is determined one is required. If for example a motherboard were to fail, we would send out a tech based on customer availability. Printhead failures, when this is the case, do not typically fall under this requirement, since changing a printhead is somehting any customer can do quickly and easily.”

This is an important point, and I want to clear up any misunderstandings I may have caused. The service/warranty coverage for an expensive, complicated and large print like the z3100 (or the equivalent printers from Epson or Canon) is extremely important. If the mechanics of the printer fail, it’s not like you can pack the printer back into the box, drop it off at UPS, and have it sent to the manufacturer. You’re very much dependent on being able to have a technician sent out to do the service on site, and if you live in a somewhat remote place (as I do) then having that service covered under the warranty is a big issue. Paying for an onsite service call can run 40% of the cost of a new printer like the z3100!

But Ben offered to extend the on-site/next business day coverage on my printer to three years (an additional two years beyond the standard coverage) at no cost - naturally, I accepted.

My email exchange with Ben makes me think that although HP are having some problems with technical support on the Z series printers, Ben is very much aware of the problems and is actively working to fix the problem and get customers problems resolved. If you have a Z3100 and you’re having problems with customer support, I strongly urge you to contact Ben (his email address is in the comments in this post) and let him know the details. And, of course, I’d love to have you share whether your problems get resolved in the comments here.

I really like my z3100, and I’m glad to see that HP seem to be taking my complaints about technical support very seriously indeed. Good for them!

Well, I had stuff planned for the early part of this week. Instead of doing those things, I had weather. We’re fine here, with no problems other than a plugged culvert that caused water to flow across our driveway and threatened to wash it out. That’s all under control, now. Not fixed, but under control. Amazing what can be accomplished with plastic tarps, eh?

But roads are closed all over, which might make it interesting to go into Seattle in a few hours. At least this isn’t like last November, where the entire world was cut off from the center of civilization (aka Carnation, WA). This time, it was other places that really got hammered, although when driving home last night I several times had to drive through standing water 4-6 inches deep.

The good news is that the printheads for the Z3100 arrived, I put them in, and the printer seems to be fine now. It chugged along nicely yesterday when I was helping a friend out by making some prints for him. The nice prints did a lot to take the bad taste of my horrid support experience out of my mouth.

I’ve been enthusiastically sharing my experiences with my HP DesignJet Z3100. Most of those experiences have been great. The only problem with prints that I’ve experienced has been a problem with intermittent horizontal banding that, because I haven’t dedicated a large block of time to pursuing it, has up until now eluded my troubleshooting efforts. At no point have I been unable to get the print quality I’ve wanted, although sometimes it’s taken some fiddling.

So a couple of weeks ago, I’d discovered that I could generate a diagnostic print from the front panel of the printer. And when I did this, I got a diagnostic print which I interpreted as showing that I had pretty significant nozzle clog issues. Running nozzle cleaning cycles didn’t clear the problem.

So I called Hp Technical support, where the technician, Sean, guided me through about an hour of checking things, and then suggested pulling all the print heads, pressing them against a wet paper towel until the ink was drawn through the print head, and then replacing the heads. I was short on time, so I closed the call with Sean before I could give this a try. The next day, though, I gave it a try, and was dismayed to find that not only did it not resolve the problems, it didn’t actually improve the situation at all. I was fairly frustrated, especially because it was not really clear to me that Sean understood what diagnostic print I was looking at.

And then it was time for the Thanksgiving holidays, and I was away for a while. Yesterday, though, I was resolved to call HP back and get the matter cleared up. I’m planning on doing a lot of printing this winter, and I want the printer in perfect working order at the start.

First thing I did was to run another diagnostic print. This showed some changes from two weeks ago, and in particular, the problem with the PK/LG printhead had improved (but still with problems) and the problems with the B/GN head had gotten quite a lot worse.

So, because often such things are easier to work via email, I tried the HP onliine/email tech support, using the form on their web page to tell my story, complete with three part harmony and feeling. In 24 hours, I got a response saying, essentially, “It sounds like you have print heads that should be replaced. Please call our tech support people, who will arrange to get replacements shipped to you under warranty.”

So, armed with this diagnostic print and the email, I called HP tech support, where I answered the voice recognition prompts by telling the system that I was having trouble with a Designjet z3100 and I am using Macs, not Windows. So I got connected to a Mac technician, who listened to my story, and then told me that he was going to have to reroute my call because he was a Mac support technician, and I was having problems with the printer hardware. In the future, he told me, if I lied to the VR system and told it I was using Windows, I’d get connected to the hardware support group. When I pointed out that it might make more sense to adjust the voice recognition prompts so that customers using Mac and having hardware problems didn’t waste 15 minutes getting rerouted, he cheerfully agreed, and then put me in the waiting pool for the hardware folks.

When I finally got connected to the right support group, I was talking to Robert. I told my story to Robert, this time with five part harmony. And, rather than agreeing to just ship me new print heads, Robert wanted to go through another round of pulling the print heads, soaking them, replacing them, doing head cleaning cycles, and so on. Fine.

And there, the problems began. Robert didn’t know the menu structure for the front panel on the Z3100. In fact, I knew more about it than he did. He didn’t know what diagnostic print I was generating, even after I carefully described how to use the front panel to generate it. Every time he asked me to do something, we had this little cycle where I’d ask him to give me specific instructions on how to do that, and he’d have to put me on hold for five minutes while he ran off and found out how to do it so he could tell me. He must have put me on hold for a total of one hour out of the first two hours of the support phone call, much of that time to go off and research how to get the menu item he wanted me to use. This was complicated considerably when he gave me specific instructions about which menu options to pick, only to have me land at a dead end when the option he wanted me to pick wasn’t on my printer. (It turns out he was working from a different version of the firmware from what was in my printer). When Robert went off to generate a diagnostic print on a printer at HP, it took nearly half an hour because the printer he had access to was not warmed up and wanted to go through 15 minutes of calisthenics, and then it had to generate the print - all while I waited on the phone.

But, with tears in my eyes and with my frustration level mounting rapidly, I stumbled through removing all the heads, doing the ‘press against a wet lintless cloth’ thing, replacing them all, and running another diagnostic print. The net result was no change. He then had me try it again, this time just with the most problematic head. At this point, the B/GN head stopped working completely, and the printer was dead. It couldn’t do a print head alignment. It couldn’t make prints. HP tech support had managed to lead me through the steps of starting with a working printer with an intermittent problem and fussing with it until it had become a $4000 doorstop.

So, after about 2.5 hours, and with my blood pressure ranging upward into the ‘massive brain crushing stroke is imminent’ range, I asked Robert what I needed to do to get this whole thing resolved. Robert’s suggestion was to have HP ship me a replacement for the failed head - he would put me on hold, and go get authorization to do that. I suggested that, purely in the interests of having me not have a myocardial infarction, perhaps HP could see their way clear to replacing ALL the heads, so that all those other heads with problems would get resolved, too. Nope, he said. No way he could get someone to authorize that.

So I asked to talk to Robert’s supervisor, James. James gave me the old song and dance, and told me under no circumstances would he agree to replace all the heads. When I told him that ALL the heads were showing clogged nozzles that wouldn’t go away, he wanted the long form list of all the things we’d tried. Then he told me that a certain number of clogged nozzles was acceptable and that the printer could compensate (I actually believe this is true) but couldn’t give me a firm number on what the threshold of acceptability was. Finally he seemed to agree that any head with more than, say, 10 clogged nozzles or which showed banding on the diagnostic print should be replaced. Was I seeing that on any of the print heads? So I went through all six heads, and counted the clogged nozzles and the banding. And the upshot was that, after half an hour of arguing with me, he agreed to ship a complete set of print heads, as long as I would go through the process of giving Robert all the warranty dates off the print heads.

Naturally, it took Robert three tries and two five minute periods on hold for him to tell me where to find the warranty dates on the print heads. But after that, I gave him all the dates, and he said he’d get those heads sent out asap. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” he asked. “Well,” I said, “it would be nice if you’d give me the support case number, so that when the print heads don’t show up, I can refer back to this entire debacle without having to go through the entire 2.5 hour ordeal again. And that was a problem, because Robert claimed that their computer system was being upgraded and he couldn’t give me a case number. He’d have to call me back, he said, and give me the case number and the order numbers for the printheads. And so we parted company, with him steadfastly promising to call back, and leave voice mail with those numbers for me, absolutely cross my heart hope to die stick a needle in my eye for sure.

And the next part of the saga was when I returned from the play last night, fully expecting to check voicemail and find a message from Robert with the case number and the order numbers. And of course, there was no voice mail. In fact, caller ID indicated no calls at all, so Robert didn’t even try to call. I had to call, work my way back through the voice tree, and then ask for Robert before I managed to connect with him and have him apologetically give me the case number and order numbers.

So here’s my advice to HP on how to improve their technical support:

1. Don’t ask people to tell you if they’re using Windows or Mac if what you really want to know is if they’re having a Mac software problem or any other problem. It just pissed me off, and it would be so simple to fix it’s not funny.
2. Your support people should have in front of them a copy of the menu tree for the front panel FOR EACH FIRMWARE REVISION, so that they are not forced to ask the customer to ‘read the choices back to me.’ When your support staff are getting help on the menu tree from the customer, something is desperately wrong with how you are handling things.
3. As a general rule, support technicians should not throw their hands up in despair when the instructions they give the customer result in a previously working product not working at all. Instead, they should either coach the customer through getting it working again, or they should pass the case off to a more experienced technician who can solve the problem. I had to spend a frustrating half hour AFTER the support call cleaning print head contacts before my printer started even vaguely working again. You can bet that during that half hour, I was pretty much continuously engaging in imaginative language use regarding the genealogy of the support technicians at HP.
4. After your incompetent support technician burns 2.5 hours of a customer’s time fiddling with a printer, getting ink all over his hands, pulling print heads and replacing them, and getting him well and truly frustrated, that’s NOT the time to suggest that the printer is actually completely within spec and there’s no problem to be resolved at all, it’s just a misunderstanding. That’s particularly true when the first question the customer asked was “So given that I have this diagnostic print that I interpret as showing nozzles clogged, is my interpretation correct, and are these nozzle clogs the source of the intermittent banding I’ve been getting?”
5. When you promise to call back and give the customer a case number and order numbers, for the love of all that’s holy call him back EVEN IF YOU DON’T HAVE THE NUMBERS. If you can’t get the numbers, call him back and explain why you don’t have them. But if the customer has to call you back and ask why the hell you didn’t call the way you promised, no amount of abject groveling and apologizing will convince him that you weren’t trying to slip one past and renege on your promise.
6. At the most general, your product support staff should not convey the impression that they find those customers with problems to be an irritant. Instead, your product support staff, especially those supporting really expensive printers, should convey the impression that they will not, under any circumstances, accept an outcome where the customer’s problem hasn’t been resolved to the customer’s satisfaction, NO MATTER WHAT IT TAKES.
7. When the retail price of a printhead pair is $60 US, the actual marginal cost to HP is probably $15. So when you tell me that you want me to spend several more hours fiddling with the printer to avoid you having to just replace all six printhead pairs instead of the one pair you broke, what you’re telling me is that HP thinks that pissing me off and valuing my time as free is a better choice than saying “You know what, Mr. Butzi? I’m worried that if we don’t just replace all these print heads that we’ve been fiddling with, you’re going to run into more problems down the road, and that will just cause you more lost time and frustration. So I think it would be best if we just shipped you a complete new set, so that you can move forward from this point with more confidence in the printer you’ve bought. Would it be ok with you if we asked to you take a few extra minutes to replace all the heads now, rather than having to worry that we’ll run into more problems down the road? We’d really appreciate it.”
8. Let me just observe that your competitor, who has massive market share and who you are trying to displace, not only has given me excellent phone support but offers one year of next business day/on site support as part of the purchase price, so that when my 9600 fell over dead, I called them, they talked me through about 15 minutes of trying to bring it back to life (so that I could get back to work instantly) and then sadly informed me that they thought it was going to require a technician onsite to fix it, would it be ok if the technician got there at 8:30am since I’m in a remote place? Your printer is a wonder, but your support is not even remotely on a par with that provided by Epson. And you can bet that I will take that into consideration with the NEXT large format printer purchase.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the prints from the z3100. But I sure hope I don’t have many more problems that require technical support, because the phone support from HP is atrocious. It’s execrable. It’s horrid, it’s a travesty. It’s odious. If I had known that the printer didn’t come with next business day/on site service for at least a year, I would probably have bought an Epson.

Not much time this morning, just enough to post a few notes on my z3100 experiences so far:

1. My $1000 rebate check from HP finally arrived. Whew. Now I can relax until the next time I buy something that includes a whopping big rebate and see that the form says “No PO boxes”. What a stupid, stupid way to generate stress in your customer base.
2. My z3100 ran the light gray ink cartridge dry yesterday afternoon, just as I got to the end of making prints to be framed for my upcoming show (Show opens Saturday). The fact that I managed to get all the display prints made before running out of ink flies in the face of Murphy’s law. The web display of how much ink in the cartridge read “53ml”. But the printer claimed the cartridge was empty. I pulled it, it’s definitely empty. It’s not clear if the cartridge was short fill or if the printer is somehow losing light gray ink. I had some intermittent banding, and it may be that the printer doesn’t account for ink lost to head cleaning, and that’s where all that light gray ink went. I suppose a call to HP Support is in order. Sigh

Other than the intermittent banding (which seems to go away and come back, and all occurred more than a month ago so that my memory is a little hazy), and the ink mystery, the printer is great. It just chugs along. The fact that it’s way faster than the Epson 9600 is definitely a plus - I got a lot of printing done yesterday before I ran out of ink.

I’ll stop by my local supplier today to buy an emergency cartridge to get me printing again. This just shows the folly of owning a printer and not having spare ink cartridges on hand - I’ve also ordered a complete set of ink cartridges that should be delivered next week.

Because I’m fairly detail oriented/obsessive I kept fairly accurate records of my ink costs per print on my Epson 9600. Paying $88 (a decent street price) for each 220ml cartridge in the 9600, my ink costs worked out to about $0.75 per square foot of image area.

The HP Z3100 does much of the work for me - ink usage is tracked, per print, and can be displayed using the web browser interface.

Based on those data, my ink costs for prints on the z3100 so far work out to about $0.47 per square foot of image area. Those figures are for printing on HP Professional Photo Satin. Prints on watercolor papers use more ink, which will probably edge the ink costs upward some amount. I don’t have enough data on those prints to assess the costs yet.

Sadly, I haven’t found a paper which competes on cost with the Epson Enhanced Matte I was using for work prints. This will drive my day to day work printing costs up substantially. (suggestions for a decent, cheap paper for the Z3100 will be eagerly accepted. Suggestions for decent, cheap paper that comes in 17″ wide rolls even more eagerly accepted.)

When I bought my Hp Z3100, the pricing included a $1000 rebate.

I hate rebates. I hate them to pieces.

Here’s what I hate about rebates. All manufacturers, for reasons that I frankly don’t understand, refuse to send rebates to post office boxes. No doubt their motivation has something to do with some stupid blather about preventing fraud and all that crap. I don’t know, and I don’t care.

What pisses me off most intensely is that I have no alternative that’s simple. It’s not like I can give them a street address, BECAUSE I LIVE AT THE END OF 2.5 MILES OF GRAVEL ROAD AND THE POST OFFICE DOES NOT DELIVER MAIL TO MY STREET ADDRESS. I know this is hard for mindless dweebs who have never driven on a gravel road to understand, but there are actually residences in the USA where the post office does not deliver. And, amazingly, people who live in such places get their mail delivered to PO boxes at the local post office. All of this is perfectly normal and perfectly legal.

I’m tired of the implication that if I get my mail at a PO box I’m a crook. I hope the person responsible for this has something really unpleasant happen to them today. And tomorrow, and the day after that. I hope all their mail gets misdirected to Chicken, Alaska, especially their paychecks. In perpetuity.

So I’ve sent in the form to HP, listing BOTH my street address and my PO Box, and giving the nine-digit zip code that corresponds to my PO box. (Yes, actually, all those people who insist that a nine digit zip code isn’t enough to identify someone - you’re wrong. My nine digit zip code narrows down to exactly four people, all in my family). I’ll just have to hope that when the rebate check arrives at my local post office, the postal clerk who handles it will figure out which PO box to put it in.

Oh, and here’s the kicker. The address I have to send the rebate materials to?

It’s a frickin’ PO box. Apparently, HP feel that this isn’t a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

To say that this diminishes my respect for HP as a company is to vastly understate the situation.

Due to my diligent work ethic, much progress here.
On the z3100 printer front: more papers profiled and test printed. First paper: Crane Museo Max, which is fabulous stuff. One job for today is to make a couple of toned B&W prints on this stuff and see what they’re like. I suspect/expect/hope they will be fabulous. Also profiled and test printed (after some encouragement) HP Professional Satin Photo Paper, which I was fully prepared to dislike (I thought it would be like Epson Premium Luster, with a sort of surface finish like Kodak’s E surface RC papers) but it is delightfully nice looking stuff. Almost but not quite like air-dried glossy. My first color print on this stuff blew me right out of my sneakers. Ok, they weren’t sneakers, they were ratty old pair of Merrill Jungle Mocs, but you get the drift.

This weekend I’m hoping that I will get time to select and order a few other papers to evaluate. Evaluating papers on the Z3100 is fun and easy and not at all like doing real work.

More news on the Z3100 front: apparently the next round of Z3100 firmware/drivers will allow the user to directly specify some of the printer settings when creating new paper types, instead of forcing the user to use an arcane HP document to look up the morally correct lie to give the printer (in other words, you’re profiling a matte surface paper, so you tell the driver it’s really profiling “Matte Photo Paper” or “Fine Art Paper > 250 gsm”, and give the printer a knowing wink, so that it will use ink load, etc. that are what you want).

HP were, as far as I know, the first printer manufacturer to give users the information about what the various paper selections actually did in terms of ink load, etc. And now it appears that they will be the first to give the users more direct control of these features. This should make it a lot easier for people to get the best results from various third party papers, although it will also increase the complexity for the end user. In the end I hope this is the direction the printing world goes, because it’s the direction that gives the user the most complete control. Kudos to HP.

Also rumored to come with the new driver/firmware is the ability to print on deckle edge paper - something that isn’t possible with the current z3100 because the paper skew detection is driven crazy by the deckle edge. Apparently this support will consist of allowing people to turn skew detection off - which might well go a long way toward making paper loading less cumbersome.

It’s worth noting that so far HP have been delivering frequent updates to the drivers and firmware, and in the process have been steadily improving the quality of output and usability of the Z3100 even for those customers who bought one many months ago. I’m pretty confident that over the lifetime of the printer I will continue to see steady improvements. That’s a big contrast to my Epson 9600, which has received exactly ONE firmware upgrade since I bought it.

Also on the work slate here is evaluating the Canon PowerShot G9, which arrived late yesterday afternoon. This is the camera I will be taking on a trip soon, so I’m hoping that I will find no showstopper problems. So far (after a mere 60 odd exposures) I’m pretty happy with the camera.