Great stuff, AG. I have the lowly i865 which I'm extremely happy
with, but the inks do get quite expensive. I've also found Ilford
Gallerie classic pearl and gloss to work extremely well with it
through trialing various papers. How does the b/w performance differ
with the MIS inks? At my camera club people have remarked on how good
the b/w prints are that I produce doing nothing beyond default print
settings, so it would be a shame to lose this. I appreciate the time
you put in to write up your findings.
James
On 30 Jul 2005, at 14:49, AG Schnozz wrote:
> I recently converted over to MIS bulk inks for the Canon S9000
> printer. My paper of choice is either Ilford Galerie Classic
> Pearl or Ilford Galerie Classic Gloss.
>
> When using Canon Inks (at $12 per tank) I was able to just stick
> with the built-in Canon driver color profile from Canon and/or
> bypassed the color profile and used my own slight modifications
> to the color balances/intensities in the driver itself.
>
> Then I went to Colorlabs Inks (at about $3 per tank) and had to
> do a lot of serious setting changes to adapt to the colorcast of
> the inks. They definitely were not neutral and were a complete
> fading disaster when printed on Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy.
> They were fine, though, on the Ilford Classic papers.
>
> In neither of these cases was I ever able to use the color
> profiles from Ilford.
>
> Now, I'm using MIS inks (at probably an average cost per tank of
> less than $1) the inks are noticably very close to Canon. The
> color fading aspect is still a mystery, but I have a print
> containing several test charts (ITC, GratagMacbeth, and some
> handmade ones) taped to the south wall siding of my house, just
> under the eave.
>
> My color-profile wasn't quite right. I had to do too much
> tweeking for it to be predictable and repeatable without test
> prints. I reenabled the ICM setting in the Canon printer driver
> and set the color profile to the appropriate one from ILFORD for
> the paper. Crossed my fingers and let her rip.
>
> I compared the print to the monitor and thought "that's funny".
> Other than a very slight warmness to the print, the two were
> nearly a perfect match. I made a tiny white-balance change to
> the monitor and now I've FINALLY got a pretty close to perfect
> match. Zone I (near black) is a touch darker on-screen than the
> print, but the rest of the scale is visibly close enough for
> government work.
>
> The ILFORD profiles seem to work far better with the MIS inks
> than they did with the Canon inks.
>
> The one thing I've noticed right away is the improved neutrality
> in the blacks. The MIS inks appear to be slightly better
> balanced than Canon's. Except for my midtone. 18% gray appears
> just a touch more magenta than the other shades.
>
> So, I've got a couple test prints--one is taped to my siding,
> the other is sitting on the dashboard of my car. These tests may
> not necessarily be the most "scientific", but are pretty harsh
> and should give me a good indication of the stability of an
> ink/paper combination. Past experience with this testing method
> gives me a good indication in as little as two weeks. I've run
> these tests for as long as six months--one of them for over two
> years.
>
> The one characteristic I am seeing with this particular
> profile/ink/paper combination is a slight muting of the red and
> green squares in the Macbeth, but a more intense yellow.
> Skintones have held very well. Blues are clean and linear.
>
> I did make a minor change to the selected dithering pattern. I
> changed to the "diffused" setting and the result appears
> "smoother" to the naked eye, but slightly more "mottled" when
> viewed under an 8X loupe. This mottling is a nearly identical
> look to that found in a dye-cloud film/paper. Definitely not
> anything resembling digital output. Without a magnifier of some
> type the dots are invisible.
>
> I'll keep everybody updated on my tests and further
> calibrations.
>
> AG
>
>
>
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