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Rangefinder
Magazine First
Exposure: by Claude J. Jodoin
The Pro 7600 is an ideal “printer for all seasons.” With its 24-inch width transport, it prints up to 24x30 inches to fit standard frames. You can also print large wall panoramas (24 inches by any length) or album panos 24x12. With the new seventh ink (Light Black), Ultrachrome inks quadruple the display life of dyes while achieving 95 percent of their color gamut and reducing metamerism effects of the past (color shifts under different viewing lights) to a nearly imperceptible amount. This also allows the printer to achieve, with proper profiling, neutral black and white output, something impossible to do in the past. In less than an hour, I had unpacked the printer, mounted it on the stand, loaded the software on my PC clone, connected a 12-foot cable to a USB 1.1 port, and loaded the inks. All systems were ready to print—piece of cake! The first print that came out of the printer was excellent in every way. Great flesh tones, neutral whites, good shadow detail, etc. Those who saw it thought it came from a pro lab print. Any dot pattern laid down by the printer was completely invisible to the naked eye and could only be seen with a powerful loupe. Foveon Inc., maker of the exciting new X3 chip, was kind enough to lend me their Sigma SD-9 beta camera so I could create test images for this new printer. By the time you read this, your dealer shelves should be stocked with the production version of this new camera. We were able to do an actual shoot with a high school senior girl using the Sigma and output the prints on the Epson 7600 in less than one hour. Bill Atkinson
Pushes The Color Gamut Shortly into my 30 minute interview, I realized that not only was this guy brilliant, he’s a technical perfectionist when it comes to his photography. He buys and uses only the best of photographic equipment after thorough scientific testing as a basis for selection. His choice of printers was no different—he went with the Epson 9600. He said that the output rivaled or, on some images, bettered a $250,000 commercial laser printer on Fuji Crystal Archive RA-4 paper and the profiles could be used on the 7600 as well, since most studios do not need 44-inch wide output. Bill is best known for creating MacDraw, MacPaint, and HyperCard software for Apple. On the weekends, he has always balanced his daily programming chores by doing landscape photography for therapeutic fun and profit. Bill possesses a unique combination of computer programming skills, color management savvy and photography talents, along with an unending quest for “the perfect print.” After installing his Epson 9600, he felt that the excellent capability of the Epson printer was not being utilized to full potential. So he set out to totally “linearize” it for black and white neutrality, while simultaneously allowing the printer to reach its full color gamut potential. Since none of the expensive software packages on the market could do this to his satisfaction, he devised his own targets and wrote his own software code/scripts to create custom profiles to his personal standards of excellence. Bill found that the native “No Color Adjust” mode was so far from linear and gray balanced, that a smooth ramp of neutrals from black to white would print with easily visible “lumps” and “color warbles.” These had to be ironed out for each paper and for each resolution setting of the printer. After logging in over 1600 man-hours, and measuring several hundred thousand color and gray patches, over several months, he finally tamed the color beast and fine tuned each profile. By creating these for all of the most popular Epson papers and donating them to the Epson user community, he has done a great, unselfish service for all photographic artists. We owe many thanks to Mr. Atkinson for his kind contributions. You may view his gorgeous color landscapes and mineral rock studies at www.billatkinson.com. Meanwhile, Back in the Studio After she left the studio with her 16x20 print, I set out to print more images from the session on different papers while using the various Atkinson profiles.
For output test, we used three different Epson papers—the Premium Luster (similar to “E” surface), the Premium Semi-Matte (similar to “N” surface) and the Smooth Fine Art paper (SFA). The SFGA is made especially for Epson by Crane and is a 100 percent cotton rag with special coatings to maximize the Epson Pigment inks. It is a matte paper with a thick, rich feel. This paper works best for the “watercolor” type of painterly images, which are gaining in popularity among photographers. One thing I have noticed during a more extensive testing is that the 1440 setting looks just as sharp as the 2880 and it runs just a bit faster. This is something that you would have to judge for yourself, but you will definitely need a loupe to do it. I doubt that even young eyes could tell them apart without this viewing aid. Additional Benefits to Photographers Using a fantastic bargain utility, called Qimage Pro (www.ddisoftware.com) that rides on top of the Epson printer driver, we can completely automate this process. We can cue up as many 8x10 prints as we wish, have this utility automatically crop any file from multiple folders to full bleed 8x10s side by side, sharpen, apply the Atkinson profiles on the fly and cut them up automatically. So if you cued up 90 8x10s you could just go home and have them waiting in the basket the next morning. Sixty cuts later, you have all 90 of those 8x10 prints ready to mount and deliver. The beauty of using roll stock printers vs. the more popular desktop units is that the material costs per print are almost half that of desktop units. It’s much cheaper for Epson to package the inks in larger cartridges and to ship paper on a roll rather than cut it into sheets and box it. Good news, indeed. Claude Jodoin has been involved in
digital imaging since 1986 and has not used film since 1999. You can
email him at:claudej1@aol.com. |
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The evolution
continues. Epson has, as of June 2002, brought us the Stylus Pro
7600 (24-inch) and Pro 9600 (44-inch) printers. Identical in output
quality, they have twice the horizontal resolution (2880) and twice
the vertical resolution (1440) of their 7500/9500 predecessors. Using
a new piezoelectric (a.k.a. piezo) head technology (DX3) that creates
variable (three sizes) ink drops, the smallest of which (4 Picoliters)
is half the size of the old head designs. It also allows for full
bleed printing, which means, that no paper white space ever need
be wasted. All this at over twice the speed for only half the asking
price of the previous generations printers. Wow!
