Printing calibrators, anyone do this?

[David Rowland]

ahh yes….i did wonder this when i was back in the CRT days…

what program do you draw with (or need calibrated to match the printer)

[David Crocker]

quote Dave Rowland:

ahh yes….i did wonder this when i was back in the CRT days…

what program do you draw with (or need calibrated to match the printer)

I use Photoshop CS in RGBStandard, EuroscaleV2 cmyk saved in TIFF, working cmyk plate switched on and Versaworks latest release.

CRT you mention, yes I use that and I thought CRT was the preffered choice for graphics vs flat screen monitors. Im in the market for a huge PC upgrade soon and this involves a huge sweet glass fronted TFT monitor, and from the demo, graphics and colours were well nice.

Cheers
Dave

[David Rowland]

ah ok well firstly I don’t know how Versaworks works, but I do know a little about photoshop and that is how i run it too.

Corel has colour management but it isn’t as good ‘out of the box’ as Illustrator, however I have tuned a CRT with a monitor calibrator in the past that gave me the files to lock Corel correctly, worked well.

Basically, I am really happy with the Flatscreens we have, we made a big purchase to replace the CRT’s as they were making the staff tired, this problem is now gone, I have got the CRT’s now and prefer using my laptop. lol

Ipex was a great experience, I was keen as mustard to make a note of the big guns where using as calibrated monitors, then took the big step of ordering the lacie monitors and then had to supply Apple monitors and I remembered the quality of the apple monitors so I ordered them.

Very good move, colour accuracy improved so much that most of the Lacie CRTs have shown so variation and age, the colour quickly goes bad and it stuggles with darker colours so much that mistakes have happened.

Recently on purchasing a load of Dell computers, we actually got 2x 22" Dell monitors and I have been shockingly surprised how good these actually are, they are pretty close to the Apple screens, the low end budget LCD monitors are catching up to the better ones and the Dell ones were not marketed much in colour accuracy.

Now glass is not actually the best screen, it suffers from relfections and I have seen this between Dell laptops, there is a range that has a very decent quality monitor for colour but if you wear a bright white t-shirt and near a window, forget it, a coated monitor oddly seems better for us

My next monitor will take some research as the 20" Apples look a bit small but working well after a couple of years, I noticed that monitors do fade a bit as the lamps age.

CRT’s days are numbered, LCD is the way to go and a DVI connected lead to the computer (digital, no analogue conversions).

A couple of old threads
https://www.uksignboards.com/viewtopic.p … ight=lacie

https://www.uksignboards.com/viewtopic.p … cie#184089

[Simon.Johnson]

Hi David,

If it helps your thoughts, you can buy an i1 based profiling package which will calibrate both monitors and printers for under £500.00ex-VAT.

This will work with both VersaWorks and ColoRIP/Wasatch/Troop.

[Chris Wool]

david i think spire digital do that one worth a call. i keep saying i will try one

01380 871962

[Peter Normington]

I am actually using the efi set up, (mentioned by Chris) after having colour issues with files sent by clients, up to now having good results,
and having acceptable results making my own profiles, I am no expert with colour and like all things there is a learning curve. but well worth a look at, One thing I did like, I can use the eye one to capture a spot colour from my pantone book and it works within reason, that is depending on the colour, and the limits of cymk print

Peter

[David Crocker]

quote Simon.Johnson:

Hi David,

If it helps your thoughts, you can buy an i1 based profiling package which will calibrate both monitors and printers for under £500.00ex-VAT.

This will work with both VersaWorks and ColoRIP/Wasatch/Troop.

Thanks Simon (and everyone else^)

Simon, I really must’ve hit the wrong site initially because I though the EyeOne was £1500+ !

Anyway, does £225.00 sound about right?

I hit this "EZColor & Eye-One Display Bundle" from Native Digital.

Is this the baby Im after?

Cheers again
Dave.

[David Rowland]

you can get a decent monitor for that 😉

eye one’s for screens really will be pointless… trust me, i done a lot on this subject.

I wouldn’t mind one for the RIP & JV3 but how often do I change media brands, very rarely tbh so no need to calibrate.

[Peter Normington]

Dave,
its an interesting topic, I am always looking to get my jv3 to print as it should, I have used signlab for many years, and although I consider it one of the best progs for design, I cant get it to print a pantone (yes I know the limitations) as a pantone.
I dont want a rip to print what is seen on the monitor, but rather a true colour.

So to me the important thing is to have a profile that comes close to what the original design calls for, so calibrating printer and media, is more important than the monitor.

Peter

[Warren Beard]

I agree Peter, as long as it is sent with the correct colour breakdown/pantone colour to the printer then it does not matter what it looks like on screen but what it looks like on the final print. This is basically how I work as my mac screen has very bright vibrant colours but prints much darker, but the print is very accurate to pantone colours (well sort of as accurate as you can get)

Spend more getting your print right then your screen, it is always great to have both matching but sometimes unrealistic as you are trying to compare to different medias 😉 Have you ever tried to hold up a pantone chart against your PC monitor :lol1:

[Steve Vallis]

quote Peter Normington:

Dave,
its an interesting topic, I am always looking to get my jv3 to print as it should, I have used signlab for many years, and although I consider it one of the best progs for design, I cant get it to print a pantone (yes I know the limitations) as a pantone.
I dont want a rip to print what is seen on the monitor, but rather a true colour.

So to me the important thing is to have a profile that comes close to what the original design calls for, so calibrating printer and media, is more important than the monitor.

Peter

I agree. Make the printer print the correct colour and match the monitor to the output.

[David Rowland]

Well that’s why at the time we went with Shiraz, they offered a service where the materials could be sent to them so they could adjust the printers profile to match up on their showroom machines, they then put that profile on their database to allow others to download it off their website. At the time of purchase most of our materials were in the database and we have consistency between Avery materials except banner material which is ‘near’. Problem AIT have is they cannot stock all the printers in the showroom, it’s not viable. The colour/print quality was the deciding factor when purchasing the JV3, at the time other companies were not able a vast range of materials already tuned.

Each material manufacturer, RIP Software developer and Printer manufacturer needs to work with each other to cover possible scenarios. Ideally I would like to see a UKSB Printer Profiles folder here, but how many of us have Calibration equipment, possibly only a few so would be hard to police due to piracy.

Lets take a job made up in CMYK, the display and printer profiles determine how to interpret the colours for your eye due to the limitations of your monitor, same with printer. If the monitor is off colour, get another one with a good reviews on Colour Gamut range.

[Peter Normington]

The calibration equipment need not be expensive, thats the point I was making about the eye one and efi setup, would it not be reasonable to spend a few quid on top of what you pay for the printer and other equipment, in order to make your own profiles?

Peter

[David Rowland]

well eye-ones and similar kit look the same, however the actual hardware reader is actually locked in the chip.

so if you bought a printer calibration kit for £1500 then your good to go, but then if you bought a eyeone screen reader then unless eyeone do a trade in deal, you have to purchase new hardware again if you want to do the whole thing.

But why buy all this kit when you got a CRT? The CRT calibrator that I have is not compatible with LCDs.

I posted in another forum talking about CRT vs LCD for gaming reasons , so I copy and paste it here for further reading.

http://www.eizo.co.uk
http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/range.htm?id=10016
http://www.nec-display-solutions.co.uk/ … index.html
You won’t find a CRT on the sites now, I have 2 remaining Lacie CRT’s and they are fading, shame really. The LaCie monitor does employ the Dynatron tube which I think Sony had a lot to do with which is a later Trinitron tube.

This is about the Cinema screens by Apple, I now have 5 of the 20" screens in front of my designers, we do work daily with large format digital printing and have saved a lot of money by having these as mistakes have been reduced from "guess the colour".
http://pdf.euro.apple.com/pdf/pn=Displa … larity.pdf

With regards refresh rate scanning, it don’t exist on LCD’s, your eyes see around 50hz and CRT monitors flicker as your eyes see the scan, if you look away at a monitor/TV and watch the screen you will see the flicker, if you use 75hz it makes it easier to see, however you still get tired with the flicker. Does make you wonder why we strive to achieve fast FPS graphics when you cant actually display them on a CRT, however it does smooth the game out on busy graphics.

LCD monitors have ‘response times’, basically the lower the number the better it is for gaming, if you move a mouse over the screen you should see Mouse pointer trails, this is the response of the monitor attempting to update the screen, if you don’t see trails then you have a fast response time, this is down to the processing speed of the monitor. With these fast screens then the FPS does start to make sense.

Oh and Sharpness of small text on a flatscreen is incredible.

Cheap answer… Pantone Huey, I like the idea of it updating the screen and can be twinned up to calibrate monitors.
http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/p … id=79&ca=2

[Peter Normington]

quote Dave Rowland:

so if you bought a printer calibration kit for £1500 then your good to go, but then if you bought a eyeone screen reader then unless eyeone do a trade in deal, you have to purchase new hardware again if you want to do the whole thing.

Dave have a look at efi, dont know what hardware you are talking about,
but the kit comes with an eye one and a holder for the test print, which is scanned and then interpreted by the profiler software to produce an icc profile,

Peter

[David Crocker]

thanks for all your input guys.

Ill be getting a new monitor soon anyway so I think a little more investment for some calibration will be on the list too.

Cheer again 😉
Dave.