Apart from a very slight deficit of sharpness, I don't see much in the functionality that needs improving. I'd also recommend some sort of HTML documentation for the settings options. Apart from that, to solve the zillion settings issue by giving people decent starting points, I suggest bundling some pre-configured settings into the install package, one of which would be a good-quality no-color-correction settings-set for the CMS crowd, and another for normal users wanting to print photos. I guess this is something that could be easily fixed by adjusting the linearization settings, but I don't know how to do it. Suggested improvements: A minor quibble, there is a slight gamut issue with the reds on the 2400, at least on matte paper. But then, of course I printed with perceptual rendering.ĭaylight/Indoors: Disparities between the samples seemed stronger in incandescent light. The red is better but not perfect as rendered by the Epson driver. - The Colorchecker looked good on both samples, except - you guessed it- for the red patch.However this is not visible to the naked eye. - Examination with a loupe showed a weave/stripe pattern on the Gutenprint sample, while the Epson sample showed more random fill patterns.- I'd say the reds are significantly better with Epson's driver.- Highlight definition of colored zones looks better with the Gutenprint driver.- The Epson shows a smidge more contrast (due to the blocked shadows ?) and slightly more sharpness.-Neutrals were neutral, shadow gradients smooth. Print Quality: Looking at the Chromaticity target, rendered perceptually. The Gutenprint gamut seemed better in the shadows. The gamut looked fairly similar to the Epson driver, except in the reds where there may be a bug. Looking at the target indicated Gutenprint has a better linearization out of the box. Profile Quality: I profiled both Gutenprint and the proprietary driver with Monaco Profiler, using the simple 343 patch target that results in very smooth inkjet profiles. Not unusably slow but much much much slower than the Epson driver. Print Speed: On my Epson 2400, Gutenprint was slow. Nothing new here - and that's exactly the way we want it. Although the margins are different, everything ends up at the right place when you click the "Center Image" checkbox. Printing: You can print to your newly installed Gutenprint device from Photoshop via the usual Print with Preview dialog. I'd say this is the only bad aspect of this driver. Hint: Set the printer to Line Art if you are doing profiled printing with Photoshop working as the color engine. Printer Configuration: On the Mac you set up the printer by pointing a browser at the CUPS web interface, located at and there are zillions of incomprehensible parameters. Gutenprint does as well here as the Epson driver. Creation of a print queue is done via the Mac's Printer Setup app, and is well documented in a PDF supplied with the package. Installation: On the Mac, an update installation of the latest GutenPrint is easy, via a package that can be downloaded from Sourceforge. Profiling with XRITE DTP-70 spectro and Monaco Profiler 4.8, eyeball evaluation by using the Chromacity target, and male and female eyes. Gutenprint's excellent functionality is obscured (read obfuscated) by an interface overloaded with undocumented options.Įquipment used: Epson 2400, connected to a Dual 2.5 Ghz PowerMac G5 printing on Epson archival matte. Nutshell report: Very easy to install and very good results, on a par with the proprietary Epson RGB driver. Today, I'll just discuss my findings when using the beta Gutenprint V5.0 RC3 as an inkjet RGB driver for printing images from Photoshop. In conjunction with other preinstalled components such as CUPS and Ghostscript, this open source system project forms a RIP system, supporting 8 and 16 bit RGB and CMYK files as well as PDF and Postscript, and it's present on every Mac, and can run on every Linux box. I have started to look at the Gimp-Print inkjet drivers (now called Gutenprint).
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