Just saw this on Rob Galbraith....

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_p...cid=7-8735-8762

In the article Rob mentions that by calibrating his 4800 to the Epson standard he can then make use of Bill Atkinson's profiles for the 9800 printer. Have others had success with this concept?

Does it follow that by calibrating a 3800 printer using ColorBase, that using the 9800 profiles will also become an option for that printer as well?

Any thoughts? The targets are printing out of my 3800 right now.

I've never heard of it, but thanks very much for the posting and the link.
I've had an Epson 3800 for a month now--I've been using Epson's
and other paper manufacturers' profiles, have had Atkinson's profiles for
a while now just for the heck of it, and just got an EyeOne Photo
spectrophotometer bundle today, so it now looks like I've got all the necessary
components required to experiment with ColorBase. If I get any interesting
results, I'll post them here.

I believe that ColorBase Linearizes the printer at the driver level. You can turn off it's effects if you don't like them.

You will notice with Atkinson's profiles he includes a PDF document which describes the exact printer setup. The PDF shows that his printer had been linearized using ColorBase before making the profiles.

With your own i1 photo, from what I understand, you must use ColorBase to linearize first... and then profile the printer with i1 second.

I would guess that anyone who has custom profiles would basically invalidate those by running ColorBase after the fact (but only to the degree that their printer output deviates from Epson's "standard").

Over a month ago I tried it very briefly and it did not seem to bring a 3800 to 4800 specs.
I did not see any improvement in the printer linearity, so I removed the colorbase software. Too bad, it seemed like it would be a good software.

Let us know if your experience is different; I might give it another try.

John

My understanding is that the 3800 uses a newer screening algorithm when printing (as well as a newer head design). I would (pleasantly) surprised if Bill's profiles could be used directly with the 3800, even after running ColorBase.

Eric

New screening, but there is no reason I can think of why they could not match the Cc Mm Y Kkk response of the driver like they did in the other x800 printers. It is the same K3 ink after all.
My test of colorbase was exceedingly brief, so I should not state that they don't match, as I did not actually test that.

John

By the way, can you use ColorBase with non-Epson papers? From what I read before with version 1, it would only accept Epson papers. Somebody tried it with a third-party luster-like paper and ColorBase complained and reported an error.

Eric

That could be. I tried to perform the premium glossy calibration using Kirkland paper, and it said something to the effect of "Your printer is so far out of calibration, you are not allowed to continue"

I removed the software 10 seconds after that.

John

Considering that to use Colorbase you need to have a spectrophotometer, I don't see much reason to want to use someone else's profiles on your Colorbase "calibrated" printer. If you own a supported spectro, most likely you will have profile creation software to go with it, so you could make your own profiles.

Colorbase is a great idea, but because it is "limited" to Epson papers it is a poor implementation. If it allowed you to set the ink limit and linearization for any paper, this would give you optimum performance on any paper. It would also possibly cut down on Epson's paper profits.