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 About
Joe...
Joe Farace is a Colorado-based writer and photographer who photographs a wide
variety of subjects.
Dear Diary: Making inkjet prints is easy; everybody knows
that. What’s difficult is making good prints, but as with any problem,
the doctor has a simple prescription. It’s called testing. The second
part of this answer acknowledges that printing isn’t inexpensive, making
the cost of testing more costly than you might think. Part three is that while
insurance plans ensure we use generic drugs to keep their claims low, the use
of generic or third-party inks seems much less acceptable. Printer manufacturers
go out of their way to tell us that using third-party inks will void your warranty.
What they forget to mention is that if you don’t need the warranty, what’s
the point? Well, I’ve got a secret—using third-party ink is not
a sin.
Testing...Testing...
During testing, I showed the three sets of images to all kinds of people. Some
were pros, others were amateur photographers, and some were simply those “everyday
people,” as Sly and the Family Stone once sang about. Prints were viewed
under whatever kind of lighting that was present, emulating real-world conditions
varying from daylight to tungsten to fluorescent, and a jambalaya of all three.
When asked, “What print do you like best,” most people picked prints
using Media Street’s ink and Epson’s paper. One exception was the
black-and-white image that was a 50-50 split between the prints made on Epson
paper with Epson ink and the prints made on Epson paper with MediaStreet inks.
Color is subjective, so it’s important to view prints under the best possible
lighting conditions. How can you tell if your prints are the right color if
the light source under which you view them is too yellow? For critical analysis,
I used an Ott-Lite TrueColor Jupiter Magnifier Table Lamp to examine the images’
print color under correct lighting conditions. It was usually easy to eliminate
one of the three prints and concentrate on the remaining two, which often exhibited
slight differences that may not be noticeable under typical viewing conditions,
but here’s what I found: It was difficult to ascertain any differences
in the color bars in the Epson/Epson vs. the Media Street/Media Street prints
of the PhotoDisc target image. Some variations showed in the gray scale, with
the Epson print being cooler, while the Media Street was warmer, making the
four flesh tones look better.
For the landscape image, the differences were minor again, but the clear winner
was the print made on Epson paper with the Media Street inks. However, the combination
of Epson/Epson was the best choice for the black-and-white portrait. The photo
of Mary was also an Epson/Epson win with more-natural flesh tones than the two
Media Street versions.
The two best prints of the family portrait were made on Epson paper, with the
Media Street print being slightly more magenta, while the Epson inks were more
natural.
Blind Testing
I decided to save you some time and made three sets of prints using an Epson
Stylus Photo 1280 printer. I made the test of prints using an eMachines computer
running Windows XP Home.
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The PhotoDisc PDI Target image is difficult to print and is found
in the CD Extras/ColorSync CD Extras/Target Photodisc folder of
the Apple OS 9 CD but a TIFF file is a TIFF file. This image was
printed on glossy paper.
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The first set was made with Epson media and ink. The second set was created
using Epson paper and Media Street (www.mediastreet.com)
Plug-N-Play inks. The third set of prints was made using Media Street Generations
papers and their Plug-N-Play inks. Unlike changing from dye-based to pigment
ink (See “What Kind of Ink?”), there are no problems switching from
the Epson inks to Media Street’s ink. Since you’re just swapping
one kind of dye ink for another, no cleaning is required. I picked five different
images for the test. Some were shot on film, others with different kinds of
digital SLRs, and another was a standard file.
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I shot a landscape image with a Hasselblad XPan, using Kodak color
negative film, digitized with an Epson Perfection 4870 PHOTO scanner,
and printed on glossy paper.
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The family portrait was chosen for its emphasis on skin tones
and was photographed as a RAW file by Mary Farace, who used an
Olympus E-1 digital SLR. It was printed on Matte surface paper.
(Various skin tones are contained on the PDI Target.)
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A photograph of my wife, Mary, featured a mixture of skin tones
as well as foliage reference colors, and was taken with a Canon
EOS-1d Mark II. It was printed on Glossy paper.
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Finally, I picked a black-and-white portrait of Nebraska model,
Farra, which was taken with the Canon EOS 20D’s native black-and-white
mode. Monochrome images show any slight color shift, and this
was the one print that participants spent the most time studying.
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