z3100 Research turns up some issues

Looks like some serious color issues early this year...

Luminous Landscape Forum > HP Z3100 Problems with Colour Gamut

The internet is great for finding out stuff the sales guys won't tell you.
Most of those posts are from the Febuary time frame. Looks like there was some firmware updates that may have taken care of the issue.

Printing Insights #46 has a good log of issues.

What is disturbing is the feel from all the posts that HP is not recognizing the issue (or at least not being simpathetic to their costomers that just shelled out $4k for their product and now are pretty pissed) Finally found that HP had an official response.

Another thing I've been finding is that a lot of the people posting about their experience with the Z3100 have a 4000 as well, makes me think my 4000 is still well loved and deserves more attention.

Z3100 Not the answer?

Well I started getting all excited about the purchase of the HP3100 thinking of all the possibilities, that is until I called my brother to tell him my plans. He is a service manager for a prepress supply company and deals alot with HIGH END printers. Well he really put out my fire on this one say that while his company is an authorized HP dealer, they are not carrying the 3100 due the various problems tpeople are having with them. I'll need to do more research to (hopefully) disprove this but he says that every trade show its been at this year has got a Z3100 in it with an HP tech shaking his head and throwing up his hands in surrender.
He suggested that I fix the 4000 and if I wanted he'd get me the necessary parts and when I'm ready, he could throw a 7800 my way for cheap.

More Prism work

After seeing that re-profiling my printer with Prism helped the posterization of shadows I was getting using the cheap Kirkland Glossy Photo printer. I tried the same thing for my Epson Premium Luster paper, which is my perfered archival paper.
I had recently paid for a Cathy's professional profile which was fine when I got it but now was seeing the same posterization effects in the shadow areas of prints.

Creating a new profile did (PP2 - PLuster), in fact, improve the prints. So what's the deal? Is the printer color output shifting over time? My test prints show that all nozzles are firing. I'm starting to believe my brother who says its the third party inks I'm using, even though I have read people having the same issue with Epson Ink.

One to watch for now, I guess.

Epson 4000 funky shadows

Big expensive printer and I'm getting some funky things going on in the shadows

Original vs. print (Cropped)

Original	Print

looks like some Posterization in the shadow area. Tried to research websites for this problem most talk about inproper linerization which can't be fixed if your printing through the print driver like I am, a RIP is needed. Well RIPs are very expensive - I could buy another printer for the cost of a good RIP.

Others said its a problem with profiles/paper/media selection.

Profile Prism work

Retring the Profiling the Epson 4000 with profile prism to rid myself of some funky posterization going on in the shadow areas of prints.

First run using Kirkland Professtional Glossy Photo Paper
MIS pigment ink
Printing through QIMAGE and the Epson Driver useing the following settings
- Epson Premium SemiGloss paper selected
- 1440 fine dpi
- nothing checked
- No color correction

Profiled using the 'bright' target reccommended for Epson printers
Initial software settings:
Normal brightness, contrast, saturation and Metamerism set to off.
First results:
Exposure: proper (230)
WB: Excellent (1%)
LV:Excellent (5%)
2 patches cliped
SD:Excelent to grey patches clipped.
Printer:
Exposure: 228
2 patches clipped.

Results

Before	After

A bit better and the colors over all are better.