I certainly appreciate the Technical Newsletters available from HP. It demonstrates their attention to posts on these forums.
What is also required for a printer such as the z3100 is knowledgable tech support staff. Users of this type of printer need real tech support. Even if new users get a sort of coupon for up to 30 minutes of support and it is pay by the call after that it would be a huge improvement. I spent an hour on the phone yesterday with my profiling questions and they guy could only come back with canned answers since he had no idea himself. He was taking guesses like me! The questions I had could have been answered in 5 minutes by someone knowledgable. It was very frustrating to learn that he had no higher level of support he could send me to.

Charles,
I feel your pain. Even the HP Partner support line has quite often failed me, and as a vendor I would expect us to recieve the top teir level of support. What questions were you trying to get answered.

Julian Mussi
www.spectraflow.com

I was asking why after doing only the calibration on the 100 patch target with a new custom paper the software automatically places two 1252 kb icc files in my color folder and then when I do the actual profile using the 500 patch target it places a 800 kb icc file in my color folder. The two files created after calibration get GEON and GEOFF added to them automatically too. This presumably refers to the gloss enhancer. What is the purpose of these two large files? They are created at a point in the process where there is not enough info to create a good profile yet they are nearly twice the size of the final profile. I end up with three icc profiles in my folder. I know by looking at the process that I should not use the first two. They mention nothing about these three profiles in the docs.

If you set up a custom paper in the Color Center, you are not REQUIRED to create a custom ICC profile for it. Based on the media type you choose when you create the custom paper, the Color Center will create a "generic" profile for that paper. Once you create your own profile (using the embedded system or external packages) this is added to the mix. So yes, you could have several profiles for each custom paper you create.

For example, if you create a custom paper for Moab Entrada, and you choose Fine Art Paper as the "starting point", the Color Center will associate its generic Fine Art Paper profile with that custom media type. Unless of course you create your own!

Hope this helps...

Eric Bullock
Mac Business Solutions