A very capable monochrome printer

In addition to doing a very poor job of emphasizing the DesignJet 90’s self calibration capabilities, courtesy of the built in colorimeter, Hewlett Packard does an even worse job as regards explaining quality monochrome printing. You have to delve deep into their web site to find a document named ‘ICC Profiles – for black and white images’. This leads you to downloading a file containing 8 Jpgs, each containing 7 copies of the same monochrome photograph with slight tint variations. You start by printing the Neutral profile Jpg on paper of your choice then select the picture with the most pleasing tint. Say it’s the one captioned ‘Magenta’. You then proceed to the Magenta profile and print that Jpg, electing the best. Then all you have to do is download the related ICC profile from the HP web site and drop it into the /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles folder and choose that profile when printing in Photoshop.

It all takes less time to do than to describe and, once again, HP’s instructions are outstanding. I did this using the three sheets of free HP Photo Matte paper provided with the printer, which is recommended for monochrome ‘art’ prints, whatever that means. As Himmler once remarked, “When I hear the word ‘Art’, I reach for my gun”. Frankly I find the surface of this paper to be deader than yesterday’s news but I suppose it’s fine if you want to mount 4″ x 6″ prints in 30″ x 40″ mats, sign in 2B pencil and make sure you append a 1/10 designation. This confirms for the twit with a big checkbook that this is none other than a Limited Edition of ten, and the price, of course, is inversely proportional to the size of the photo.

Here’s a snap of three of the profile pages and a 13″ x 19″ print made with the profile of choice on the DesignJet. This is an outstanding fine tuning capability, though I think I will stick with HP Photo Satin paper as I like a little life in my print surface.

In the original print a very full tonal scale is retained, though a glossier paper would improve on this further.

An 18″ x 24″ print emerges after a spot of calibration

I can think of several dozen things I would rather do than calibrate a photo printer. Like pulling weeds, bathing the dog, polishing shoes, changing the oil in the car, stripping old paint, and on and on.

However, it rained today so that ruled out the weeds and paint. The oil is fresh. Bertie the Border Terrier is clean and my shoes look fine. So the inevitable came to pass and I spent a big part of the day calibrating the HP Designjet 90 for optimal results. By that I mean that the screen and printed images must be as close as possible with regard to colors and tonal range.

I concentrated my efforts on HP Premium Plus Photo Satin paper, which I expect to use the most. On more critical examination, it has slightly less sheen than Epson Premium Luster and slightly finer stippling. Either way, both papers retain detail well without the specular reflection problems of glossy surfaces.

First I learned what I had done wrong to cause the paper jam yesterday. The HP’s paper source tray is large and must abut just so with the body of the printer for the paper feed to work properly. I really do not have enough room behind this monster to load paper from behind and in any case I like the idea of the paper being properly supported as it wends its way past the print heads. I fancy a touch of furniture polish on the sides of the source tray will do wonders to ease the stiction between the mating plastic surfaces which makes full insertion of the tray tricky. Epson has it all over the HP here, as the paper is simply dropped in the feed slot from above and things work fine.

Still, 18” x 24” is a lot larger than 13” x 19” and cavalier handling of the paper will result in creases and malfunction. I found myself (literally) on the carpet more than once while loading the large size paper into the source tray, for lack of a large enough flat surface to place things on.

As regards color calibration, one thing I did not have to do is re-calibrate the screen with the Monaco colorimeter, as that profile was fresh. That still leaves a ton of variables and where the Epson preferred to deny Photoshop any color management, the HP’s instructions are quite the opposite and very detailed. There are so many steps it’s easy to miss something.

When I finally printed my first 18” x 24” it was like being back in the darkroom 35 years ago.

Breathtaking.

Simply breathtaking.

No question about it for this photographer. Nothing beats a Really Large Print.

Color matching is near perfect. I can do better but we are very much in the area of diminishing returns here. As for resolution, smoothness of tone, ease of creation of the original file, I challenge any medium format photographer to equal the output and sheer involving quality of the Canon EOS 5D’s full frame sensor. And I’m still only using JPG Fine here. RAW has yet to come.

I struggled a bit with nomenclature. It seems that 18” x 24” is called ‘Arch C’ in that moronic European size naming convention that printer manufacturers have adopted. For goodness sake, what the devil does Super B3, or JB5 or A2 mean to you? Now 12” x 15” or 16” x 20” we can all understand. Well, the engineers be damned. I scrawled ‘Arch C’ with one of those indelible pens beloved of graffiti artists all over the box of HP’s paper, the better to know what to dial in next time.

How much larger is 18” x 24” than 13” x 19”? See for yourself – the Leica is for scale (no, not for sale):

Yes, that’s our boy Winston on his fourth birthday. I learned from one of Canon’s tutorials on the web that setting the Threshold slider in Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask (what a stupid name for something that is intended to sharpen – engineers at it again) to 1 or 2, rather than zero, takes the bite out of facial pores and makes for a nicer look in portraits, so I dialed in 250/1/1 for this portrait. Despite being at 400 ISO and some two stops underexposed (ooops!) it’s near perfect as regards definition and tonal range once fixed in Photoshop.

There’s a lot of nonsense written about printers on the web. One ‘prominent’ site gave the HP a mediocre review, accusing the machine of color casts. Now I have no axe to grind for any particular manufacturer. I’m not paid by Hewlett Packard, or anyone else, and I do not get free printers and supplies to play with. I will use what works for me. But I cannot help suspecting that the boob writing this piece is fairly clueless about proper calibration of a printer which starts with the use of a colorimeter to profile the screen. He makes no mention of using one. The old rule applies. Garbage in, garbage out. I may denigrate technique as a means – nay, a hurdle – to an end, but you have to have it to get there consistently at a high level of quality

Want lousy prints from the HP? I have several I can offer you from today’s efforts. Want lousy prints from the Epson? Same answer. But want stunning, drop dead gorgeous framed pictures from either and you only have to calibrate things properly to be assured of the best results. The only way you will be able to tell the difference between Epson and HP prints is by the size. The market is simply too competitive for it to be otherwise.

Ink jet printers have not come very far in the last six years, based on my experience. Meaning the Epson 1270 was terrific back then and remains so today. Maybe inks are more permanent, maybe manufacturers’ paper profiles are better than before, but my standard for comparison is the old Epson 1270 and, believe me, that’s a very demanding benchmark indeed. I think I’m almost there in matching it with the HP Designjet 90. The only difference is that I can now go larger.

So if you want a good large format printer at some 60% of the price of the 17” Epson, you could do worse than the HP DesignJet 90. Or get the 130 model for a bit more if you need 24” wide. They do versions with a roll paper feed, and I avoided that like the plague. Ever tried to get roll paper to lie flat? They also do a version with a colorimeter for screen profiling, but as I already had one the base model printer worked for me.

‘Expert’ reviewers seem to overlook the fact that the HP DesignJet has a built in colorimeter to aid creation of a perfect paper profile for each of their papers. This does not obviate the need for a screen colorimeter like the Monaco to create a screen profile, but it ensures the paper’s profile is accurately defined.

Here’s how it works. You insert an 8.5″ x 11″ piece of HP paper of your choice and run the Calibrate Color utility. It prints a test pattern and then sucks the paper back in and, using the built in colorimeter, compares ideal against actual, adjusting the paper’s profile as appropriate. That is very clever and HP does a lousy job of marketing a feature that no other consumer priced printer offers, as far as I know.

I have created three profiles thus – Satin, Gloss and Matte. Once done you throw away the pattern and get on with life. As with any paper, you have to remember to tell Photoshop which surface you are printing on but the rest is automatic.

By the way, the 18″ x 24″ print took 13 minutes to make and the HP Photo Satin paper is 76 lb. weight compared to 67 lbs. for Epson Premium Luster.

First serious prints and some myths debunked

Let’s get the myths out of the way first. I had read somewhere on the World Wide (disinformation) Web that so much as a sneeze or a hint of moisture would make the inks on prints made with the HP DesignetJet printer run. I had the 8 1/2 ” x 11″ print from yesterday’s evening trial run handy (it was made without any attempt to color balance nor did I use the right paper profile) so I let it dry for one hour and then took it to the Pindelski High Tech Test Lab, also known as the kitchen sink:

My dry elephant seals were now well and truly in their habitat as I soaked the lower half of the print with tap water for thirty seconds. That’s a little more moisture than from a sneeze, I would think. Placing the half wet seals on the Pindelski High Tech Moisture Removal Center, aka the dish drying rack, I let the print air dry overnight and came back in the morning.

Guess what. No color changes or running ink to be seen. Just ’cause it’s written don’t mean it’s so.

As it’s raining today I decided to calibrate the printer and see what she could do on large prints. HP includes 3 sheets each of their Photo and Proofing Gloss, Photo Satin and Photo Matte with the printer in 13″ x 19″ size. Such generosity. I had also taken the precaution of buying 40 sheets of the HP Photo Satin in 18″ x 24″ to try the largest width the DesignJet 90 can handle. That’s a lot larger than 13″ x 19″ – 75% larger.

It has been quite a while since I set up Photoshop to match the Epson 1270 and their Premium Luster paper to make things automatic, so I had quite forgotten how to get through all the arcane menus in Photoshop. Mercifully, HP provides a tutorial CD with the printer (what is happening at Hewlett Packard?), and this one actually loaded first time on the iMac G5, unlike the recalcitrant driver disk. The on-screen tutorial is really outstanding, narrated in clear, non-technical English. The thrust is simply one of “Select these options for the best print” without a lot of gobbledegook about gamuts, color spaces and all that garbage which has little interest to real life photographers who just want their print to come out like it looks on the screen.

I had earlier created a profile for the screen using the Monaco EZColor colorimeter thingy, so I left that alone as the monitor has not been on that long that color drift from age would be an issue.

Unlike the Epson 1270 which is silent when switched on and dormant, the DesignJet has a fan whirring away. Not really obtrusive but a wear part nonetheless, so I switched it off overnight. Warm up took just over a minute and I gave her a try with one of the free 13″ x 19″ sheets of HP Photo Satin whose sheen is identical, to my eye, to Epson Premium Luster though the weight of the paper seems quite a bit more. The back of the HP paper is rough rather than smooth, but I can’t see that mattering either way.

I set up Photoshop as instructed on the CD video and saved the setting as ‘HP Photo Satin’. I haven’t tried the other papers but the HP Photo Matte looks interesting. It is dead matte, lighter in weight than either the Gloss or Satin and very much whiter viewed in daylight. HP recommends it for black and white printing which seems to make sense and indeed their web site has a ton of paper profiles together with very detailed instructions on how to get the best monochrome prints from the DesignJet. Nice to know but right now the focus is color, so that will have to wait.

Clearly, HP has done a great deal of work on color matching and paper profiles as you would expect from a company that has long had a leading position in large format printing in the graphics design and architectural work places.

The Epson 1270 is a very quiet printer. I always had to use it in non-bidirectional printing mode to avoid tracks on large prints, so that doubled printing time and, as I recall, a 13″ x 19″ would take some 28 minutes to make. The DesignJet is a different kettle of fish. It clanks, whirrs and grinds a lot when starting up and then gives a distinctive ‘clack’ with every pass of the print head on 13″ and wider prints, although once running on smaller prints it’s near silent. The table on which it sits has a space frame base construction – light but extremely strong – yet I could clearly see the table vibrate gently with each pass of the print head. To cut a long story short, the print emerged in 9 1/2 minutes and I let it dry an hour before comparing it to the screen in natural daylight. It was immediately clear that print quality was exceptional, indistinguishable from the Epson, and there was no sign of any ink tracks on the surface. The printed area had a 1/4″ margin on the top, bottom and left side and a 7/16″ margin on the right, making for a print size of 12 1/2″ x 18 5/16″, a tad larger than that from the Epson 1270.

One thing I do not like is that you have to adjust the input and output trays in disparate ways depending on the size of the paper, so I’m going to make a little guide for the commonly used sizes and paste it to the top of the printer. HP provides a good guide in their book, but it’s more detailed than I need and involves too much hunting for the right settings.

After the print had dried for an hour I compared it with the image on the iMac’s screen, which is some 14″ wide and I must say it was very, very close. Greens in this landscape subject were a tad darker in the print but everything else was in order. The next test will be with a portrait, whose flesh tones should really provide for critical evaluation. That one will be 18″ x 24″.

The monster printer arrives

I dropped off the Epson 1270 printer at the UPS Store early in the afternoon not, it should be added, without a sigh. This great machine had served me well and many fine prints testify to its reliability and quality. I think the recipient will do great things with it. If nothing else, it will be a huge test of his technical skill – a 13″ x 19″ is not like making an 8″ x 10″. No sooner had I arrived home than Marty Paris, great acoustical guitarist that he is, arrived at the gate. “I have a big box for you” he intoned dramatically. Gulp! I had been without a printer for all of 45 minutes. Marty is our UPS man in his spare time and you could not meet a finer person.

Well, after Bert the Border Terrier had jumped in the UPS van for his cookie (Marty comes prepared) we struggled to get the 75 pound box on the dolly and lowered it gently to the ground. “Six years I got from the old printer, Marty”. “Wow! Nothing lasts more than three years today. That’s fantastic!” Nice to know the Epson has gone to a good home.

Bertie supervised while I struggled to unpack this bear. The fine people at B&H in New York had not chintzed on the packing, double boxing with more polystyrene peanuts than you really want to know about. By the time I got through the layers of tape, cardboard, polystyrene and plastic, the thing was almost manageable. The weight had halved. I had taken the precaution of clearing a space for it in the office – the old niche was too small – as well as running a long USB cable to feed it pictures. Enough time in the dark recesses of the wiring cabinet, replete with black beetles and cobwebs. There is a fortune waiting for the person who works out how to unwire home computers.

Now I must admit to some dismay on first extricating this monster from its cocoon. When I was an engineering student in London everyone knew that the finest laboratory instruments were made by Hewlett Packard. Later, on Wall Street, a like recognition played into the adoption of the HP12C as the calculator of choice. In neither case were clear instructions expected or available. You see, these devices were made by engineers for engineers, and no real engineer is going to read the instruction book. Heck, when Apollo was landing on the moon, did Buzz Aldrin check the book to determine why the panel was on the blink? Not a bit of it. A solid thump with a fist resolved the issue. It may have been “One small step for man” but a good bang ensured it was “A giant leap for humanity”. Or something.

So the cause of my dismay was none other than some of the clearest instructions known to man, on huge paper that even I could read. I’m not sure whether this means you should buy HP stock or sell it….

Anyway, with psychological support from Bertram, I manhandled the thing onto that nice little oak toppped sofaback I had made many moons ago from some alder, which I ebonized, and some gorgeous stairing oak for the top. It wasn’t conceived as a printer stand, but it does the job nicely.

HP does not supply a USB cable (how cheap is that?) but I was prepared, and my long cable was in place. The mechanical part of the installation was a breeze. You pop in six ink cartridges, followed by six print heads. Not for the colorblind, as several are like-sized, but easy to do.

Then came the software part. Now after my dismay at the clarity of the instructions, not to mention growing concern over the ease of the mechanical setup, I finally ran into a snag. And it was a big one. Try as it might, the drive mechanism in the iMac G5 refused to read the provided software CD. OK, I’m up to it, I can handle this, I’m not panicking. Dial up the HP web site, of course. Just download the driver. Not so easy, pal. The driver’s there, but you cannot download it. Mail order only. Can you believe this? Is Carly Fiorina still in charge, dammit? I though they fired her with a $40mm handshake. OK, OK. I’ll try HP Canada. No Designjet 90 in sight. Fine, how about England then. That bastion of civilization and decency must have the driver, no? No.

What to do? Well, maybe it’s just a quirk of the G5’s drive, or of the HP drive that made the CD. So I pop the CD in the iBook and Hey Presto!, she fires right up. Advised by Bert, that fount of wisdom, I plugged in one of the Firewire external drives to the iBook and before you could say ‘Woof!’ the software was on the G5’s hard drive. Minutes later the printer was installed. No lockups. The only Windows you will find in the old estate are in the walls.

That’s not to say that HP doen’t have some humorists at Software Central. Take a look at their wonderful proofreading of their software installation intructions:

The letter ‘u’ somehow dropped off the HP typewriter.

By this time the sun is setting, the evening libation beckons and I only have time for one quick print from the wretched Photoshop to see if the printer is speaking to the G5. So I load up a RAW image of the elephant seals just north of Hearst Castle on the magnificent Pacific coast and …. a jam. A piercing noise emanates from the beast and the yellow light blinks. Now in case you think HP is no longer dominated by engineers, just take a look at the control panel on this machine:

Now do you see why Aldrin resorted to brute force? Same guy designed the bloody buttons in the Lunar Module, for God’s sake. To be honest I had loaded one sheet of Epson Premium Luster in the HP to try things out, so maybe this was some sort of corporate rivalry at work and HP had the thing jam by design anytime non-HP paper was inserted. So I pressed every button in sight, threatened Bert with physical violence, and slammed ten more sheet of Epson’s finest on top of the one I had loaded.

And she printed just fine. 105 seconds for an 8″ x 10″ which is about four times faster than that great Epson 1270. Colors were right, density a tad pale, but this may well be the start of a beautiful friendship. Even if the birth was a Caesarean.

The Epson 1270 printer

When it first appeared on the market six years ago, the Epson 1270 color dye ink jet printer was the first consumer priced printer which could make large – meaning 13” wide and up to 44” long – prints with high quality and repeatability. I bought mine new in March, 2000 for $539.05 and proceeded to produce hundreds of color and monochrome prints with it. First in 8” x 10”, later in 13” x 19” sizes, which makes for a nice 22” x 28” wall sized matted, framed result.

I’m not writing this because the Epson has given up the ghost. Far from it. The only reason that I know exactly when I bought it and how much I paid is that I just resurrected the original shipping box from the attic and found the sales invoice in there. You see, the Epson will soon be making its way east to my nerdy friend whose current printer is limited to 8” x 10”, and he know and loves the quality this machine is capable of, reliably producing at 13” x 19” prints.

Ink remains easily available, even if all the colors are in one cartridge and the Epson’s software is about as good at predicting the ink levels as the Federal Reserve is at predicting inflation. Which is to say it gets it in the ball park but don’t stake your life (or next print) on it. Epson sold a lot of these wonderful printers and given the profit margins on ink sales you can bet fresh ink cartridges will be available for a long time.

Conservatively, I’m guessing that the 1270 has at least another four good years left in it, which makes for a ten year life in a digital age where products are seemingly obsolete days after hitting the market. Epson made the 1270 obsolete soon after I bought mine and eventually switched to pigment based inks with claims of great longevity. Didn’t worry me one bit. I have framed originals which are six years old and they look as fresh as the day they were made. I simply do not display them in full daylight eight hours a day.

One of the great appeals of the Epson 1270 was that its use of dye based inks, despite their reputation for fading, resulted in a color print quality very similar to that obtained with the old Cibachrome process. This was, for most, not something to be undertaken at home, as the temperature margins of the chemicals were narrow to put it mildly and their toxicity comparable to the effluent from Chernobyl. What Cibachrome gave you was a wonderful depth of color albeit at the expense of high contrast, so it matched up nicely with milder emulsions like Kodachrome II and, later, Kodachrome 25 and 64, provided your exposure was spot on. Paired with that old grain hound GAF/Ansco 500, Cibachrome was a dream. It was a strict teacher, but get the exposure right and the dynamic range was there for all to see.

The only reason the 1270 is moving on is that I find I want to make 16” x 20” and 18” x 24” prints more often, and if that does not sound like much of a change the latter size is almost twice the area of 13” x 19”. That’s a lot bigger when it comes to visual impact.

So B&H Photo has an order from me for a Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 (they are backlogged, suggesting the secret is out) offering dye based inks which, miracle of miracles, are allegedly fade resistant. I toyed with the idea of the Design Jet 130 model which goes up to 24” wide, but concluded that prints that large were pretty much the exception rather than the rule for me, so common sense prevailed over machismo.

Truth be told, I am a tad apprehensive about the new printer. Not that installing the thing worries me – heck, with an Apple iMac it’s just one more ‘Plug and Play’ exercise. No, as a long time user of HP’s 12C calculator (a device now some 25 years old!) my wariness results from my all too great familiarity with HP’s instruction manuals. Hewlett Packard was always an engineer’s company, run by and for engineers, with the brief exception of a disastrous, mercifully brief, time under a chief executive who confused her posterior with her elbow daily, while spending far too much time on the former in the corporate jet. Now that the company has returned as an engineering powerhouse, I’m afraid that the same people who wrote the manual for my 12C calculator will have been involved in the book for the DesignJet. They or their kids.

On the other hand, like all good engineers, they probably believe that instructions are for losers, so the first thing I propose to do when the machine finally arrives is to pitch the instruction book. Worked with the HP 12C and Reverse Polish Notation was never an issue for this Pole. Any descendant of a proud nation that can charge Panzers on horseback needs no instruction book. And it doesn’t hurt that I have an honors degree in Engineering earned before the days of ‘open book’ exams.

Goodbye Epson. You delivered beyond any rational expectations.