epson printers on amd64

[David Southwell]

On Sunday 20 November 2011 01:58:07 David Southwell wrote:
> On Sunday 20 November 2011 01:33:53 David Southwell wrote:
> > On Saturday 19 November 2011 21:27:42 Warren Block wrote:
> > > On Sun, 20 Nov 2011, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
> > > > Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:
> > > >> On Sat, 19 Nov 2011, David Southwell wrote:
> > > >>> Anyone up to date on how to do high quality printing with
> > > >>> epson inkjet printers (in my case r2400 and r2880) on amd64
> > > >>> systems.  print/pips* reports they require 386 and do not
> > > >>> compile on amd64.
> > > >> 
> > > >> print/gimp-gutenprint works pretty well from Gimp, although
> > > >> I have not figured out how to get consistent color and brightness.
> > > >> It supports both of those printers.
> > > > 
> > > > I'm sure I'm not alone in doubting that _any_ ink-spitter is likely
> > > > to produce "high quality printing" or "consistent color and
> > > > brightness", regardless of the host support used.  Those printers
> > > > are designed to be manufactured as inexpensively as possible so as
> > > > to be sold at very low prices, the profit being in the recurring ink
> > > > sales.  "Cheap" and "high quality" tend to be incompatible design
> > > > goals.
> > > 
> > > (Sorry, I hadn't realized I was replying on -emulation, which is meant
> > > for computer emulation.  CCed to -questions on this reply.)
> > > 
> > > Quality color photos are the one area where inkjets really can do a
> > > good job.  Experimenting with cheap Epson R200 and R280 has shown that
> > > they can print better quality photos than local photo printing places.
> > > 
> > > Color and brightness are consistent until I print a different photo.
> > > Gutenprint saves the settings, it's just that they don't work
> > > the same with different photos.  Possibly this is due to my changing
> > > the wrong adjustments.
> > > 
> > > Oh, and I've only used Gutenprint on 32-bit systems so far.
> > 
> > To get high quality printing with good inkjet printeres like r2400 and
> > r2880 here are the main steps I follow:
> > 
> > 1. Define the colour space (e.g adobe rgb 1998) to be used when the image
> > is being captured.
> > 
> > 2. Shoot using the correct white space setting for the scene.
> > 
> > 3. Load onto the computer having first profiled your monitor.
> > 
> > 4. Use your  preferred editing software (e.g. photoshop) using a defined
> > working space colour profile e.g. adobe 1998 (I prefer prophoto which is
> > 32bit floating decimal point).
> > 
> > 5. Convert the colour profile of the image to the working colour space.
> > 
> > 6. Process the image.
> > 
> > 7. When processing complete choose the paper for printing.
> > 
> > 8. Make sure you have a suitable colour profile for that paper for your
> > chosen printer.
> > 
> > 9. Print using the appropriate paper profile.
> 
> Sorry I should have mentioned that ghostscript are integrating colour
> profiling using icc profiles although the last time I checked there was no
> support for the kind of monitor profile creation devices such as those
> manufactured by datacolor which I use on I hate to say it MS$ systems.
> There is an interesting paper on Ghostscript Color Management to be found
> on www.artifex.com/Ghostscript_Color_Architecture.pdf
> 
OK  thanks to you guys asking some questions I have found that 
graphics/lprof-devel
can support the creation of monitor and print profiles using Spyder 2 & Spyder 
3 from datacolor. I have been a bit lazy in following up my earlier interest 
in profiling monitors on freebsd 7.2 & 8.2 as I would like to reduce my 
reliance on MS$ and apple systems. It looks like I missed this one which is 
being compiled as I speak.

I will try forcing a compile of the 32bit code for the epson r2400 & r2880 
which I am told may compile on 64bit given some work. I will report back if I 
finish up with a viable system.

David