What made you decide to use a color laser printer for the CMYK part?
Knowing the proverbial instability of this class of output device.
Convenience? Speed?
The basic intention of this review is to help establish color
management as a basic computer technology any advanced Mac user will
use; in the introduction to the series of articles, I compared color
management as a kind of "Color Machine" to Time Machine, arguing that
anyone who deals with images on her/his Mac (and who doesn't?) needed
color management as much as a backup to preserve the integrity of her/
his images.
So the perspective of the series is from a prosumer point of view
(otherwise it would make no sense to publish it in a general Mac
magazine such as Mac Life). Therefore, it focuses on Mac OS X system-
level color management (you won't find the word "Adobe" anywhere in
the reviews and how-to articles of the series), and it focuses on
technologies prosumers will use.
I feel that color laser printers are just such a technology. You could
consider an inkjet printer for printing single images, but to print
e.g. a 20 page booklet with lots of text, but also several images,
there's just no alternative to a laser printer for these users. And
since color lasers have become cheaper and cheaper, they will now
often be the first and maybe even only printer available in a prosumer
household. So they were a primary focus for this review.
Actually, the whole idea for this review began when I bought a (high-
priced) color laser printer myself and was shocked by the lacking
quality of its output. :-)
When you say you wrote your own test program, which software did you
use for that?
You mean to write the program? Uhm, Xcode, of course, being on Mac OS
X ... Actually, the "program" is a mishmash of AppleScript scripting
that interfaces X-Rite's ColorLab and establishes the basic testing
workflow, and several Unix command line utilities I wrote in XCode to
provide functionality not available anywhere else (e.g. an exact
emulation of the softproof feature in Preview.app, or specific color
transformations). Unfortunately, while Leopard offers lots of color
management technology built-in, it is incredibly buggy (which goes to
show how rarely it is currently used ... :-(( ). For instance,
specifying a rendering intent will work neither in AppleScript's
ColorSyncScripting nor in the sips command line utility. Fortunately,
being a Mac OS X beta tester, I could swamp Apple with ColorSync
related bug reports. ;->
You don't say what version of basICColor print was used to make the
test?
I always used the most up-to-date version available in this test,
which was 3.0.0 in this case.
I found it strange that the stripped-down CMYKick and dropRGB programs
from basICColor fared even slightly better than the high-end
basICColor print, but after double-checking the test results, there
was no denying it. Meanwhile, I learned from basICColor that there's a
rational explanation for this in that basICColor print 3.0.0 contains
some bug. The soon-to-be-released version 3.1 will presumably fix this
and contain additional optimizations that would most certainly make it
advance to #1 of the list.
