[vievetrick]

wheatfield maybe you have something there as I have used a different brand but even printing to a regular paper it is iffy at best. But I expect that wih plain. IRA CHIP I will try both of these before te weekend is out. I may pick up another brand of paper. I finished the project I was working on and calmed down ... a LOT. So I will try a few methods before blowing my stack again. I will let you know how it goes and thanks again for your help.

[Ben_Edict]

wheatfield maybe you have something there as I have used a different brand but even printing to a regular paper it is iffy at best. But I expect that wih plain. IRA CHIP I will try both of these before te weekend is out. I may pick up another brand of paper. I finished the project I was working on and calmed down ... a LOT. So I will try a few methods before blowing my stack again. I will let you know how it goes and thanks again for your help.

Your experience is not uncommon. It has nothing to do with the printer itself, it is probably in perfect working order.

If you use the manufacturer's print paper (HP would be either the Advanced or the Premium Paper series, depending on printer type), you will get acceptable, vivid results, if you let the printer do the printing and colour managemt (in HP speak, that's USING the ColorSmart option). Any third party paper will give you either good results out of sheer luck or those typical dull results. And that will be the same with Canon (I just don't know their names for the printing technologies).

If your paper gave you good results with your old HP printer over some time and it doesn't do so right know, there are several option, which you need to research:

- if you have third party paper, it might simply be, that the vendor has changed his paper supplier. So the box might be still the same, but the paper inside will have completely different properties.

- you changed (even inadvertently) a setting in your application. Perhaps you have chosen a wrong paper type and set that as a default. Perhaps you have chosen a completely wrong colour management option(ICC profile.

- though original Mac monitors are not really high end, they mostly have a good colour rendering, that shouldn't be too far off, from your printer, even uncalibrated. But you might simply have chosen the wrong monitor profile - so what looks good on monitor, might be crap in the print.

- The best remedy, to get accurate colours is a monitor calibration utility. There is simply no substitute for it. Yes, one can achieve acceptable results without it, especially for the typical snapshots, friends, family holiday. But if you really want to print an image to higher standards, there is no way around colour management.

Ben

[ChrisJ]

Does your printer print quickly? By which I mean around a minute. If so its reverted to draft copy which is the default.

Printing on a Mac is a real pain as settings are in several windows and you have to use drop down menus to see the settings it is using.

In one of the drop down menus make sure you select Photo Quality (the default will be draft)

In another make sure you select the correct paper type Glossy etc. this determines the amount of ink the printer will lay down, gloss takes more ink than matt.

In PSP make sure you have Let Printer Determine Colours or words to that effect or you will have 2 sets of colour management running.

If it was your monitor your screen would look strange. It may still be out and I always advise calibrating the monitor with a HARDWARE device. (the eyeball is cronic at this it tends to see what you want it to see), but not as far out as your indicating.

ChrisJ