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By Mike Johnston
The punchline first: Everything's okay. And: "whew."
However, I just got out of about 48 hours in color-management hell. Ever been there? It's not pleasant.
The printer I was using is new to me. It's a B9180 that HP sent to me as a review sample a few days ago. The first prints I made were...well, not prints at all, but embarrassments. Something was very seriously wrong.

Wisconsin #7
But what? For a day or two, I'll be darned if I knew.
The printer was a repack, which is a bit dumb of HP from the start – the setup wasn't what was described in the Startup Guide, because the machine had already been initialized and had its language set, and so forth, and what the printer said it wanted from its little readout and what the Startup Guide was telling me to do were different things. But once I got everything put together, the built-in test sheets printed well and all the inks and printheads got a clean bill of health from the internal status monitors. So the printer hardwa...

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Mike Johnston
Mike Johnston
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Mike Johnston graduated in 1985 from the Photography Department of the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., where his photographic mentor was the late Steven Lee Szabo. Initially a photo teacher who taught at all levels from, children to the elderly, he worked as a professional photographer for 7 years in Washington as a member of the Paul Kennedy Studio. In photo magazines he was East Coast Editor of Camera & Darkroom magazine and later Editor-in-Chief of Photo Techniques magazine. He wrote more than 250 regular columns (in five different languages) for a number of publications and websites including the British Black & White Photography magazine and the late Michael Reichmann’s The Luminous-Landscape website. He now writes, edits, and maintains The Online Photographer website full time.
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