I'm conscious that I need to run the Epson Gray Balancer on my Epson
2100, but I'm also thinking of getting a Pantone SpyderPRO™ plus a
PrintFIX™ in order to profile my monitor and printer.
My question is, how good is the Pantone system at getting a neutral
gray balance? I'd expect quite good, but I've not seen anything to
confirm this. I don't see the point in coming to terms with the
complexity of the gray balancer sofware if the Pantone system will do
it all for me much more easily.
Sorry if this is a dumb question.
Brian
Not a dumb question at all, although, if you look a little closer at
the Colorvision site, I think they indicate it is mainly for color
work, and not grayscale. I had access to one of their other
inexpensive printer profiling products, Profiler Plus, which works on
a similar principal, with the difference being you use your own
scanner, and the results were terrible for greyscale. With some
tweeking, I was able to produce a color profile that was marginally
better than the stock Epson 2200 'canned' profiles.
A Google search indicates my results are more typical than unusual.
Despite the less than exciting results, I'm not certain I can lay all
of the blame at Colorvisions feet. Printing near neutral B&W from 5
colors + black is no easy task, especially when still going through
Epsons print driver. It wouldn't be hard to believe that Epson
optimized its driver for color, not B&W, print quality. There are
third party RIPs (that is short for Raster Image Processors) that are
"replacements" for Epson's drivers. Basically, these are industrial
grade, production house tools and allow the user to control the
printer to a far higher degree than most would image. They also have
industrial grade prices to match.
The most promising solution, if you are really into grayscale output,
is quadtone, or heptone printing. Basically, the color cartrige gets
replaced with a 'shades of gray' cartrige. Look at Cone Editions and
Generartions Inks for more details. Some of the output that I have
seen is truly spectacular. Again, not real cheap, but reasonable
enough to consider if B&W pushes your buttons. I'm not there yet, but
it looks like where I will be heading in the next sixth months.
All that said, their Spyder and monitor profiling solutions work, and
work well.
David Glos
