[JohnMc]

Let your vision be a strength, just remember that B&W is B&W is B&W and it comes in many colors - as any history of photography exhibit will demonstrate - digital or/and analog. Now that your printing you'll stumble around that duality of reflected vrs transmissive. Ever since E-Ink became a thing in Amazons eye I have wondered when we'd see a screen from them capable of brighter whites and 15 -21 shades of gray. Maybe one day, but until then we'll have to make a leap of sorts and be thankful is doesn't involve canceling out an orange mask. )

Let your vision be a strength, just remember that B&W is B&W is B&W and it comes in many colors - as any history of photography exhibit will demonstrate - digital or/and analog. Now that your printing you'll stumble around that duality of reflected vrs transmissive. Ever since E-Ink became a thing in Amazons eye I have wondered when we'd see a screen from them capable of brighter whites and 15 -21 shades of gray. Maybe one day, but until then we'll have to make a leap of sorts and be thankful is doesn't involve canceling out an orange mask. )

Yup. The funny thing is that I don't have as much trouble with light, since it uses a different set of primary colors - in fact, I spent a few years being a theatrical lighting designer. Thing is, though, film uses itty-bitty particles of silver nitrate which actually turn black, and all you get on the picture is either solid black or solid white - it's your eyes that sees the gradient, but that's only a transition from lots of tiny black particles to fewer, to places where there are no tiny particles (i.e., white, or whatever color the paper is). That looks very different to me from grayscale digital pictures.

The one hiccup I've had so far is really about editing, not printing - I got an .FFF (raw) file from the Library of Virginia containing a map of an area that used to be in Virginia before the Great War. It's from a Hasselblad medium format camera with 100 native mpx, and it does pixel-shifting to an effective 400 mpx. Only problem is that Silkypix can't do .FFF, and Affinity Photo can't combine pixel shifted images. Fortunately they converted it into a .DNG for me, and I was able to print that as a 16-bit uncompressed .TIFF using Canon's XPS driver at 1200dpi with A2 paper. And it really worked great!!! Fantastic results. Though this one wasn't a cropped picture and the original (1833 surveyor's map) is about three feet wide.

The adventure continues. I spent all day yesterday wrestling with the software, trying to print on A3+ (13x19") paper. I finally got it done by turning off Canon's stupid "preview" function. That Rodriguez guy whose videos I mentioned earlier was vehement about not using that function, now I know why. I thought it was Affinity's printer engine, tried it in both Photo and Publisher, and finally figured out it wasn't them at all.

Side note, there's a Rodriguez, Jr. who does vids on how to manage the products that come off the printer, cutting mats, how to handle the prints, etc. The elder Rodriguez is an expert on the machinery, the younger on production. Think they're related?

Now the next question is, whether it's worth it to go from raw to 32-bit TIFF. It's supposed to be a wide-color-space printer, but I'm not sure what it's doing with that much data, and whether it's worth the hassle. Maybe 16-bit is enough, especially since the camera's only generating, what is it, 10 bits per pixel? What I'm really interested in is the widest possible dynamic range with the least visible gradations (given my high resolution vision) in the sweep from dark to light.

[JohnMc]

How many bits is the paper your printing on, and which reflective spectrometer are you using to quantify?

Different images, media, and printer settings will yield different results, greater bit depth may, or may not be beneficial. I have solved banding issues in past by switching where the up/down sampling occurred, and adjusting the dry time on the printer.


It's fun to find where the bugs hide. I liked the canon studio for certain aspects of printing but it never seemed to be quite there in terms of consistency, though part of that was as likely due to changes in OS and editing software(s). Remember that fun when you're offered SW updates and are tempted to be an early adopter - let others do the testing and bug reporting. It is much improved but not perfect.

How many bits is the paper your printing on, and which reflective spectrometer are you using to quantify?

Different images, media, and printer settings will yield different results, greater bit depth may, or may not be beneficial. I have solved banding issues in past by switching where the up/down sampling occurred, and adjusting the dry time on the printer.


It's fun to find where the bugs hide. I liked the canon studio for certain aspects of printing but it never seemed to be quite there in terms of consistency, though part of that was as likely due to changes in OS and editing software(s). Remember that fun when you're offered SW updates and are tempted to be an early adopter - let others do the testing and bug reporting. It is much improved but not perfect.

To tell you the truth, I haven't tried to figure out the answers to those questions; my approach has been to preserve as much data as possible, figuring that whatever limitations are inherent in the hardware, I'll have done as well as I could.

My approach to early adoption comes from an aphorism from the early days of commercially available computers (IBM, Honeywell, Univac, NCR, Burroughs, and later, HP and DEC) - "You can tell who the pioneers are, they're the ones with the arrows in their backs." I'm still having trouble with the move from Win-XP to Win-7. And I'm still missing Win 2000 Server, which with DOS 6.5, the best operating systems MS has made.

[JohnMc]

Thankfully, my last PC was a Zenith Minisport, which I actually kind of liked.

[normhead]

I gave up on big printers.... the inks cost more than prints from commercial printers.

How many bits is the paper your printing on, and which reflective spectrometer are you using to quantify?

Different images, media, and printer settings will yield different results, greater bit depth may, or may not be beneficial. I have solved banding issues in past by switching where the up/down sampling occurred, and adjusting the dry time on the printer.


It's fun to find where the bugs hide. I liked the canon studio for certain aspects of printing but it never seemed to be quite there in terms of consistency, though part of that was as likely due to changes in OS and editing software(s). Remember that fun when you're offered SW updates and are tempted to be an early adopter - let others do the testing and bug reporting. It is much improved but not perfect.

So far, I've bought Canon semigloss and matte finishes, in 11x17 and 17x22. I typically print final images at a minimum of 600dpi, and usually 1200. I've only used the printer's color calibration thing built-in, and a Datacolor SpyderX for the monitor. I haven't noticed any hint of banding or any other peculiar artifacts. Really, the biggest problem I've encountered so far is due to my having failed to read the instructions before installing the driver - I use USB to connect, but I stuck the cable into the computer before the driver installation, not after as directed. It took a good bit of research and yocky-fooching to get the thing fixed.

I agree as to "early acceptance" - I go by the old computer programmer's aphorism, "You can tell who the pioneers are, they're the ones with the arrows in their backs." I wish I'd gone by that rule before I'd bought any lenses with SDM autofocus motors.

Printing cost is not that big, but problem is that you can not leave this printer without job, it needs to print daily! otherwise a cleaning cycles will destroy ink instantly.

Well, here's an anomaly: my wife fell down and broke a bone about three months ago, so I was being nurse-maid, Mr. Mom, and medical transport service provider up until about a week ago. I was in the middle of upgrading Win 7 to Win 10 (see my comment about pioneers, this thread) when she'd fallen, so I left all that stuff sit as it was for all that time. Power "outrages" occurred, and all the UPS boxes I had printers and computers plugged into shut down.

W/o seeing the results... did you run the routine a second time? did you get a good nozzle check? did attempt a manual alignment?

Fast forward, turned all the boxes back on, got the printer running, and immediately ran the normal clean-the-nozzle and check-alignment operations. It tells me everything is just peachy, no nozzles clogged at all, out of its eighteen thousand or so nozzles. That's after having sat for three months. Seems to be printing just fine.

[JohnMc]

Great, sounds like progress, or resumption, or something. Hope the bones are all mended as intended.

Your next big jump will be to print on some good paper, such as those from St Cuthberts