articles/Printers/epsonrstuylusprok3-page5
by Mike McNamee Published
The greys were very close to the neutral of the paper, never wandering by more than a Lab point or so. Metamerism was lower than the other art papers, averaging less than 1.2 over 90% of the tone range and peaking at 1.6 in the ¾ tones.
Epson Enhanced Matte Poster Board This is a 1.3mm thick board material which we assume has the same coating as paper Enhanced Matte, which was formerly Archival Matte. The surface is highly calendered, very smooth, and the core is extremely tough, taking 8 to 10 strokes of a scalpel to cut through.
Loading of board materials is rather neglected in the 4800 manual and searching for "board" produced no hits; you have to find "Loading paper into the front manual feed slot". There is also no setting for board in the 4800, whereas there is in the 7800. We worried about not having the correct thickness setting when using Enhanced Matte paper as the media setting, but it worked OK. Board-loading from the front seems a little imprecise in the absence of any mechanical guides, but the system worked quite well in practice - we doubt you could send a board through a number of times though (some people do for various reasons).
The surface is a very bright white and enhanced by OBAs which gave a rather large 10-11% lift in reflectivity at the blue end of the spectrum.
Performance on Test Board will not run through our automatic spectro and so we had to make some, more limited, hand measurements. The Dmax was a creditable 1.62 and the greys were neutral to within ½ a Lab point. The average colour error over the Macbeth Chart was 5.9ÄELab/3.23ÄE2000. Metamerism peaked at 60% Lightness at a low value of 0.9 ÄE Lab. The majority of the colours were slightly desaturated but the light blues and cyans were particularly accurate. Skin tones were accurate, with none of the yellow bias we saw with other combinations - the error on average Caucasian skin was 4.8 ÄE Lab. We used the newer profile SP4800 EM MK 2880.icc at 2880dpi for both our ABW print trial and full colour trial.
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