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Epson Stylus Pro UltraChrome K3 Printers - part 8 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

by Mike McNamee Published

Premium Luster Photo Paper 250 In the view of the writer, this is one of the most attractive papers in this category. The paper is quite weighty to give it a certain presence, the images are crisp, with a high Dmax and the OBA provides a bit of "zip" even if this is at the expense of true colour accuracy.

On test the Epson Pro and SP profiles did not perform as well as their art paper counterparts and a substantial improvement was obtained by bespoke profiling. The skin tones of both the SP and Pro profiles were desaturated by about 10% and rotated towards red/magenta by about 1‹ at the yellow end of the sweep and about 5‹ at the red end of the sweep. Visually the skin tones on images were just a little too red, especially on very tanned subjects of higher saturation. Overall, bespoke profiling improved the skin tone error by a factor of 2. Both the canned profiles rendered the overall gamut of colour 4 to 5% too dark. The greyscale linearity was good on all three profiles. Metamerism was slightly higher than the art papers. However, it actually peaked at around 65 RGB points (ie well into the . -tones) and so the effect was not really visible. Metamerism in the mid tones and highlights was always below 1.5 ƒ¢E Lab. Essentially then, the metamerism was negligible. The Dmax was 2.16 which delivered very rich monochrome images, which were neutral under neutral conditions from the driver.

The measured gamut volume for Premium Luster was 855,550 Lab3 points compared with 778,900 units for UltraChrome ink, tested on the 7600 printer with the same profiling software and test conditions.

Premium Glossy Photo Paper 250 This is a very high gloss, 260gsm paper with an apparent absence of OBAs even though it is quite a cool tone base. With a Dmax of 2.32 the depth of the tone is outstanding and the prints have a very expensive look and feel to them. All tests were conducted at 2880dpi to make use of the fine detail-retention of the gloss paper. As previously, we tested the SP profile, the Pro profile from Epson and our own bespoke profile. The Pro profile was inferior to the other two, as shown in the summary table. All the profiles created prints that were between 4% and 5% too dark.

The skin tones were generally desaturated (by between 2% and 8%) and the bespoke and SP profiles rotated the skin tone slightly towards yellow. In all three profiles, the major error in the skin tone was the lightness value. The greys progressed to the very high Dmax in a very orderly manner and good highlight separation was maintained.

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1st Published
last update 09/12/2022 14:53:59

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