I have seen this mentioned here before but it may be worth reiterating;

I have a roll of HP's Hahnemuhle fine art smooth and in the past I calibrated and profiled it on the printer.
After the last firmware update I only calibrated this paper and I am using the HP provided profile. One thing is that the HP profile takes twice the disk space. ~1.6mb vs ~800kb. The big thing is that the prints look much better using HP's profile. Better reds and the whole image just jumps off the paper compared to the profile made on the printer which looks rather flat in comparison. It makes me wonder if it is even wise to use papers other than those profiled by HP.
At any rate I use fine art paper predominantly so this is good news to me to see how much better the prints look

Charlie

Charlie, my experience has been that profiles that large (~1.6 MB) are generally built on the TC9.18 RGB (918 color patches) target instead of the "Easy RGB" (~400 color patches) target created with the base system. That means roughly twice the number of color patches.

You've hit upon the main reason I bit the bullet and bought the APS. In every case I've seen the profiles created from the TC9.18 targets are far superior.

From what I've seen the big reason to get HP media is that you're guaranteed that the coating on the paper is optimized for the HP inkset. In the world prior to Canon and HP pigment printers I think the paper manufacturers just optimized their coatings for the Epson inksets. I think that's why we see HP Hahnemuhle SFA paper for example instead of the more generic Hahnemuhle Photo Rag. I don't know this for sure but maybe Neal or Robert have the true skinny.

Many of the online paper resellers sell the Hahnemuhle paper but not the HP Hahnemuhle paper. The sales folks try to tell me that the Hahnemuhle paper they sell is the same but they don't understand.

If you talk to Jim Doyle from Shades of Paper I think you can trust what he has to say.

Ron,
Are the benefits to the APS profiles more pronounced in matte media vs satin and glossy? Are the improvements related to gamut, shadow detail, tonal transition, or all three?

Amadou, to date I've focused on matte papers. Satin papers are up next. With any luck Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Satin as my initial experiements look good on the Z3100 with GE on. It may be less pronounced on satin and glossy as the papers have great gamuts.

I do see improved gamut and shadow detail on the matte papers. I'm not sure I've been that observant with tonal transitions as not many of the images I've been printing have large areas where that would be obvious.

Softproofing is the first place I saw the improvements. It was much easier to use Jeff Schewe's print workflow for the matte papers:
- punch blacks
- use curves for highlight and contrast
- add saturation where needed

P.S. thanks for a great book on B&W - I've enjoyed it thoroughly and I'm working to implement what I've learned from it

Thanks for the additional info Ron, and for the kind words about the book.
Interesting that here I'm seeing subtly better shadow detail with some HP glossy media when comparing the canned vs custom (non APS) profiled output. Both the canned and custom profiled HPSFA output is substantially more accurate and pleasing than on the stock Photo Rag. HP needs to be putting out 44 inch rolls. Only the Pro Satin in that width so far.

I noticed as soon as I bought the APS that the canned HP pro satin and HP ID gloss profiles were very similar to my APS profiles. Both my APS and canned HP profiles are better than my small patch profiles without APS. So, if you only use HP papers I wouldn't bother with APS.

Great advice. It would have been nice if HP made this clear to folks. In any case, I'm happy with the APS in that I use several non-HP papers.

Yes, I wish I had known this before I bought APS as well since I only use the HP papers right now. Of course I wouldn't have known that the HP papers were best for my work until I profiled the non-HP papers. I'm still happy with the APS anyway. I can't imagine doing manual profiles with 1000+ targets for all the papers I've tested so far.

The Z3100+APS is a great combination in my mind. Its so dang easy to use.

I think HP papers will be the best for a while as the coatings are optimized for the Vivera inks. It will be interesting to see how the paper companies will deal with trying to optimize coatings for three pigment inksets: Epson, Canon and HP.

Without going into a repeat rant about the APS cost I still have a problem with the fact that you can't use multiple 11x17 sheets to do the profile. I can't buy a whole roll just to test a new paper..

charlie

I haven't tested it but APS 1.3 is supposed to accommodate sheets. I'm just not sure what the minimum sheet size is.