Re: 16-bit Printing
Re: 16-bit Printing
- Subject: Re: 16-bit Printing
- From: Scott Martin <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:23:58 -0600
On Nov 19, 2008, at 4:08 PM, Fleisher, Ken wrote:
I have not seen any results from one of these printers that can
accept a
full 16-bits/channel and I’m wondering if those of you who have
experience
with them, can you describe what you have seen? Do you feel there is
any
real benefit to printing a full 16-bit image? Can you actually “see” a
difference? If so, is it a significant difference?
Excellent question. The Canon iPF printers have offered high bit depth
printing for years via their Photoshop printing plug-in. Since Bill
Atkinson's targets are 16-bit, one can use his targets to profile the
printer in it's high bit depth mode. For the sake of simplicity, let's
call these 16-bit, profiles (even though one can make 16 bit profiles
from 8 bit targets). When I make evaluation prints from 8-bit profiles
in 8-bit mode and 16-bit profiles in 16-bit mode on these printers I
can see a difference, but it's really minor. I can even see a
difference when I profile the 16-bit mode using 8 and 16 bit 1728
patch targets. A granger rainbow gains smoothness when a high bit
depth mode is profiled using a high bit depth target. I think it's
quite unlikely that you would ever see this difference in a real
photograph.
So I'm tempted to conclude that high bit depth printing translates
into almost no quality improvements for the common end user.
Technically there is an improvement but it's not worth bragging about.
I do, however, suspect that the importance of printer bit depth could
increase with expanding print gamuts due to new papers and inksets.
Another issue that warrants further examination is the bit depth of
each printer's on board processing of the incoming data. Processing a
full 16 bits on the fly requires a significant amount amount of
processing power relative to processing 8 or 12 bit data. I've spoken
with engineers at Epson, HP and Canon about this issue. Contact me
offlist if you'd like to discuss this further.
Scott Martin
www.on-sight.com
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