Missing Pro curves in the community edition

InkjetMall Customer Support Piezography Inks & Printing
1

In the Community Edition collection of curves there are a number of printers with only master Pro curves. In the Notice.pdf file that come with these curves, you say “As of December 12th 2016, we have only 6 preliminary master K4 curves built for the R2000,7890,9890,4900,7900,9900,and 11880. (The K4 curves are used in the x900 printers when you are missing a channel due to a bad print head.)”

You also say “In our building of the many hundreds of Pro curves this week, we have run out of paper. When we get paper into the R&D lab in a week or so, we will optimize and finish profiling all supported papers for these printer models.” Any timeline on this? I’m mostly interested in R2000 curves, which I recall would also suit the P400 - a current model printer.

I note that you say that the master curves “are nearly universal”, but you’ve gone to the effort of producing paper-specific curves for other printers, so I assume that there must be sufficient benefit in those curves to warrant all the effort.

On a side note, In the Windows version of the CE V2.04, a number of folders have a file named “icon” (no file name suffix). My unpacking software doesn’t like these files and baulks at unpacking. It’s not hard to work around this, but it’s tedious. I assume these files are an artefact of the file being created on a Mac. I suggest they be removed from the next release.

2

I guess my question is - is it worth waiting for any more CE curves, in particular the R2000/P400? I picked up some Pro inks when I was in the US a couple of months ago, and for a couple of reasons haven’t had the chance to install them yet. But I will do so quite soon. Thus my question.

3

I’ve been waiting for missing curves in the Community Edition as well so I share your frustration (in my case x900 K5 curves for Epson Hot Press). IJM is no doubt a labor of love in many ways, and clearly there are limited resources. It’s all about balancing focus between current product and doing future product work, and I think it could be better. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we have what we have. We just need better balance.

If in fact the R2000 and P400 are similar machines (I have no idea), I note that the current Community Edition appears to have a reasonable set of curves for the P400. I just compared the R2000 Matte Cool Master Pro curve with a P400 Pro curve for Hahnemuhle Photo Rag (using my graphing software) and they are essentially identical. So I think it would be worth trying the P400 curves on your R2000.

+1 on the request to eliminate the mac nuisance files on the Windows distributions.

Dave

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FWIW, those orphan “icon” files are not only found on Windows. I see them in the Mac Curves folders for every printer. I’m specifically talking of the folder labeled “Curves”, not to be confused with “Curves-HD” where it does not appear. It is not simply a Mac nuisance file.

5

Gosh, I must be going blind! How did I miss those P400 curves? Yes, those are the ones to use. Thanks for pointing that out Dave. I feel rather silly for missing that.

I regard the R1900, R2000 and P400 as essentially the same printer, at least for QTR purposes. I suspect that were you to create curves for all three the difference would just be printer sample & age variation. That said, some printers have CE curves for 33 papers and some like the P400 for only 23. There’s still no P400 Pro curve for Canson Rag, for example. It’s going to be an empirical question whether the HPR curve or the master curve or the 3880 Pro CRP curve remapped is going to be the best fit.

And I owe you a long-overdue email, which I will send now.

Thanks Keith for pointing out that the icon files are not a Mac thing - they annoy all of us without any discrimination.