3586
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Mike's Software / Qimage / Re: Qimage Updates: Subscribe to Receive Qimage Update Emails
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on: February 19, 2010, 09:52:49 PM
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http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimageQimage v2010.200 (02/19/10): ddisoftware, Inc. has just released a significant upgrade to its Qimage photo printing software. This latest revision comes with UI (user interface) refinements that improve the overall user experience, allowing users to go from original photos to prints of optimal quality more efficiently than ever before. We've even updated the interface to be touch-aware to support multi-touch monitors and the upcoming Windows 7 touch tablets that will appear on the market later this year. On these devices, a simple flick of the finger can be used to "throw" thumbnails onto the print page, throw unwanted prints off the page, flip pages forward/back, etc. This revision has also undergone a comprehensive QA review that has led to a number of bug fixes. We know that amateurs and professionals alike depend on Qimage to produce optimal quality from their digital photos so we thank our loyal users for the opportunity to bring yet another advancement to the field of digital photo printing! Mike
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3587
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Mike's Software / Qimage / v2010.200 issues/comments
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on: February 19, 2010, 09:52:25 PM
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http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimageQimage v2010.200 (02/19/10): ddisoftware, Inc. has just released a significant upgrade to its Qimage photo printing software. This latest revision comes with UI (user interface) refinements that improve the overall user experience, allowing users to go from original photos to prints of optimal quality more efficiently than ever before. We've even updated the interface to be touch-aware to support multi-touch monitors and the upcoming Windows 7 touch tablets that will appear on the market later this year. On these devices, a simple flick of the finger can be used to "throw" thumbnails onto the print page, throw unwanted prints off the page, flip pages forward/back, etc. This revision has also undergone a comprehensive QA review that has led to a number of bug fixes. We know that amateurs and professionals alike depend on Qimage to produce optimal quality from their digital photos so we thank our loyal users for the opportunity to bring yet another advancement to the field of digital photo printing! Mike
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3588
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Mike's Software / Qimage Studio Edition (archived) / Re: Image Appeaance in Qimage
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on: February 03, 2010, 07:12:34 PM
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I still have not been able to get anyone to send me a full size screen shot (or at least a 1:1 crop of the area affected) of the Qimage screen showing this issue. I run 1920 x 1080 on my 24 inch monitor and the previews are just as sharp as the originals. If you select "High Thumb Quality", the thumbnails are plenty large enough for previews. I'd have to see an actual screen shot to really see what is going on here. It could be one of many factors (both inside and outside Qimage).
Mike
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3589
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Mike's Software / Qimage / Re: Sent to Qimage in W7 64bit installation does not work
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on: February 03, 2010, 04:40:55 PM
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v2010.112 will fix this. It turns out that the "Send To" Windows function was not working on any Windows OS. The problem has existed since the Qimage application data was migrated to the new Windows location several months ago.
In any case, v2010.112 will fix the "Send To" link for everyone.
Mike
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3592
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Mike's Software / Qimage / Re: Wide Screen Monitor is very blurred
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on: February 02, 2010, 06:30:56 PM
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Are you able to post a (full or partial) screen shot that shows the issue? I have a 24 inch monitor running 1920 x 1200 resolution and even with the page expanded to as large as possible, the previews/thumbnails look sharp and without jaggies. If you aren't running high quality thumbnails, now might be the time:
(1) Use "View", "Thumbnail/File Browser", "Thumb Quality" and set it to "High Quality".
(2) Use "View", "Rebuild Thumbs" to rebuild the thumbnails.
Mike
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3593
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Technical Discussions / Articles / February 2010: The HP B8850
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on: January 31, 2010, 08:13:33 PM
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February 2010: The HP B8850
Background
Once in a while I take a break from broader subjects to
review a particular product that I find interesting or noteworthy in
some way. This month I'm reviewing the HP B8850 photo printer.
The HP B8850 is not a ground breaking product but I do believe it
warrants some attention because I've found a number of glitches in HP's
driver software that can make this printer difficult to impossible to
use without some workarounds. I've found the B8850 to be a good
pigment printer but there are some things that are worth noting before
buying this printer and some things that can eliminate days of
frustration in working with HP's buggy driver if you already own one.
The Hardware
The B8850 is a formidable
contender in the 13 inch wide pigment printer arena as far as the
hardware is concerned. The printer itself appears to be solid and
well made, if a bit awkward in some ways. The main paper tray, for
example, sits at the bottom of the printer and pulls out the front for
loading. If you want to load multiple sheets of any type of media,
you must pull the paper tray out the front of the printer and load the
paper print-side down in the tray. For this reason, the B8850 will not
only consume almost two feet of space left-to-right on your desk or
printer stand, but also at least an additional foot in front of the
printer must remain clear in order to slide the tray out. There is
a specialty media tray just above the paper output that can be flipped
down to load single sheets. If you have 4x6 sheets loaded in the
main tray for a job and you want to print a single 8x10 or 13x19, this
comes in handy as you do not need to remove the tray and reload/reset
the tray just to print one-up larger sizes.
The B8850 uses eight
cartridges: 5 color cartridges and three B/W cartridges including gray.
The cartridges hold about twice as much ink as most other 13 inch
printers, however, which is welcome on a wider printer. In my testing,
I'm not finding the B8850 to be an ink hog and it seems to be doing
relatively well in the ink usage department. With the larger
cartridges, this is definitely a printer where you'll likely buy
cartridges only as needed rather than buying "ink packs" to have a full
set of extras on hand: a full set of inks for this printer will run you
about $240 minimum!
Initial startup takes 30-40 minutes as the printer
performs its ink charging and calibration, but after the initial
calibration, the printer responds nicely and you rarely find yourself
waiting for "ink charge" cycles that delay your printing (a complaint
that I have with my Canon Pro9000). One thing worthy of
note here: this printer does not produce its own ICC profiles, nor will
it "calibrate" for each type of paper you are using. The automatic
calibration appears to be more of a unit-specific color calibration that
is simply designed to get each individual unit into tighter specs as far
as placement of the ink and a good "mesh" with the heads and stepping
mechanisms which can have slightly different characteristics on each
unit produced. This may not be clear to consumers as some of the
reviews and media hype about the built-in "spectrophotometer" may make
it seem like the printer has its own built in profiling tool: it does
not and cannot produce any type of ICC profile that can be used via your
color management aware software.
I'm happy to report that
this printer produced very good prints on every type of media that I fed
it. Unlike Canon printers which can be a little finicky about the
type of media used, the HP seemed to produce very good prints on any
media, including media from other manufacturers and "generic" brands.
All in all, I do believe the B8850 is a formidable piece of hardware and
a quality piece of equipment. It's such a shame that it is
crippled in some ways by HP's buggy printer driver, but there are
workarounds to make things livable. More on that below!
As far as placement in the market, the B8850 comes in
just below HP's high end 13 inch model: the B9180. The B8850 is
generally about $150 cheaper than the B9180 and is missing some features that, at
least to me, are not show stoppers: no Ethernet port, no on-printer
status display, and lack of ability to handle really thick media.
Otherwise, the B8850 and B9180 produce prints of nearly identical
quality.
Gloss Differential
Call it "bronzing" or
"gloss differential", if you are familiar with pigment ink printers,
you've likely heard that printing good glossy photos can be challenging
with pigment ink. Due to the way the pigment ink interacts with
the surface of the paper, there can be a difference in gloss if you view
the paper from an angle. Areas of the print with plenty of ink can
appear duller than bright or white areas of the paper where the original
gloss still shows through. I did find this to be an issue with the
B8850 as it has no gloss optimizer like the Epson R1900. If you
view a glossy print made on (for example) HP's Advanced Photo Paper
Glossy, you can see areas of high and low gloss and some areas of the
print are just shinier than others. I didn't find it to be a big
issue because, let's face it, how many people sight down the edge of the
paper like you would a warped 2x4? It can be distracting in some
situations, however, and is something to be aware of. You just
won't get that "wet" look from glossy prints like you will a dye printer
like the Canon Pro9000. I did test a number of papers, however,
and found that Canon's Photo Paper Plus Semi-Gloss worked very well in
the B8850 and for most prints, the gloss differential on that type of
paper was not noticeable unless large areas of white were present in the
photo.
The Software
Okay, so the above might
look a little like the summary page from other review sites that
reviewed the B8850. Here's the part you won't get on the other
sites: the truth about HP's buggy printer driver. There are a
number of bugs and other "gotchas" that make using this printer a
nightmare at first. Fortunately there are workarounds for most, so
take a look at what I found while testing this printer.
Bugs, glitches, and other oddities (based on Windows
7 x64 driver):
-
Color management bug turns some prints on HP Advanced
Photo Paper Glossy a mustard yellow:
This is probably the significant bug and cost me quite a bit
of paper and research to figure out. If you are a professional or
advanced amateur, you likely use color management and you have a profile
for your monitor and profiles for each paper you use on your printer.
Kudos to HP for providing real ICC profiles for their own papers and
also
profiles for papers from other manufacturers! BUT... there's a
bug in the driver that will not allow you to use application managed
color via an ICC profile in your printing application if you are using
4x6 or 5x7 HP Advanced Photo Paper Glossy. The driver works fine
for 8x10 or 8.5x11 paper but as soon as you select 4x6 or 5x7 paper size
plus HP Advanced Photo Paper Glossy as the media type plus
"application managed color", you'll get a yellow mustard print every
time. Googling this phenomenon, you can see it has been around for
two years so I have to assume HP has no intention of fixing the problem.
Workaround: You can print using "sRGB" or "Adobe RGB" as the
color selection instead of "application managed color" which is
certainly not ideal. The other option is to select "fiber gloss"
as the paper type and create your own profile using a profiling tool
like Profile Prism.
That's what I did and I've been happy with the results. The bug
only surfaces when you select HP Advanced Photo Paper Glossy, the 4x6
paper size, and "application managed color".
-
Unchecking "Advanced Printing Features" causes paper
to be loaded but no print is produced: I often recommend unchecking
"Enable Advanced Printing Features" in Control Panel under the
properties for a particular printer when printing large prints due to
the fact that many drivers cannot handle large amounts of data with
"Enable Advanced Printing Features" checked. HP has oddly placed
this feature in the driver settings, making it visible to users each
time they print. Unchecking this box in driver settings, however,
will result in the paper loading but no print will be produced.
I've confirmed this with my own
Qimage software and also
other photo editors/printing applications. Perhaps HP should just
rename this checkbox "Allow printer to actually print" because when
unchecked, there is simply no way to get a photo to print.
Workaround: Leave the "Advanced Printing Features" box checked! ;-)
-
Reloading partially used paper can cause the printer
to think no paper is loaded: Sometimes, particularly when testing
color on certain papers, I'll load an 8.5x11 page and print a 4x6 in the
upper left corner. I'll then examine the print, make some
adjustments, and reload the same piece of paper to print another 4x6 in
the upper right of the page in the "empty" spot. You cannot do
that with this printer. It'll see something other than white paper
in the upper left and it will assume the paper didn't load properly and
will give you a paper jam notice.
Workaround: When printing test prints, print from right to left on
the page instead of left to right. Print that first 4x6 in the
upper right of the paper and the next print in the upper left when you
reload the paper. That way, the printer won't get confused.
-
When using the specialty media tray, you get a
warning that the specialty media tray is closed even when it is open
and paper has been loaded: I get a warning that the specialty media
tray is closed when it is in fact open and I've already loaded paper.
Fortunately, you can simply click "Continue" and printing will proceed
normally. Since that tray is a single sheet tray anyway, this is
not a big issue. Workaround:
Just ignore the message and continue.
-
Checking or unchecking "Borderless" fouls up other
settings: Boy, this one is annoying! Let's say you've selected
your paper type (fiber gloss), you've set your print quality to "maximum
dpi", and you've set your paper size to 8x10. Now you click the
"Features" tab and you check "Borderless". As soon as you check
"Borderless", the paper type changes to "HP Advanced Photo Paper Glossy"
and your quality drops from "maximum dpi" to "best". You have to
go back and change the paper type and quality to what you set before
checking "Borderless". This is not a paper type/borderless
incompatibility issue because those settings (paper type and "maximum
dpi") are valid with borderless printing. This is simply another
bug. Workaround: Select
"borderless" before you change other settings or use software like
Qimage
that can save/recall driver settings to avoid mistakes.
-
Printer Services doesn't work: Click the "Printer
Services" button on the "Features" tab and you are greeted by a "Unable
to perform this operation" error message.
That about sums it up for the bugs, glitches, and other
oddities. Some of them may be related to only the Windows 7 x64
version of the driver but I've seen mention of a few issues from the
above list on online forums from people using other operating systems.
Summary
While it may seem I'm being
tough on the B8850, I am using the printer as my main photo printer
right now and I'm happy with it overall. After learning how to
navigate the minefield of driver bugs, the printer is actually a fairly
nice printer to use.
Qimage
has helped a lot because I can set up all the driver settings (and
workarounds) needed and save those for each type and size paper.
Being able to do that has saved me from the potholes you may fall into
while navigating the driver itself. The bottom line is always in
the prints and the B8850 is a good piece of hardware that produces very
nice prints that have a gamut range and quality comparable to other high
end 13 inch printers on the market. While I'm using the B8850
right now and I'm happy with the quality of prints, there is some gloss
differential on all the glossy and semi-gloss media I've tried. I
don't think it's a big issue for most people but my honest take on the
13 inch pigment printer market is: nothing beats an Epson. Epson's
R1900 is the benchmark to beat and it's a shame that HP didn't include a
gloss optimizer cartridge like the R1900 and older R800/R1800 as
that seems to be the only way to get "perfect" glossy prints from a
pigment printer. That said, progress has been made with pigment
inks and the gloss differential of the B8850 isn't a big problem like it
used to be with older models, i.e. the Epson 2200. Hopefully this
article will help potential owners of the B8850 and will help existing
owners as well, as you are likely to run into some of the above issues
at some point.
Mike Chaney
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3597
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Technical Discussions / General Photography Discussion / Re: How Good Is Your Colour IQ?
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on: January 29, 2010, 01:41:55 PM
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No, I didn't cheat! We do expect you to be the expert you know - well done Terry. Well the first time I tried it, I just rushed through it as fast as I could to see what it does and I got a 3. Then I thought, hmm, might not be so hard to get a zero if I pay close attention so I ran it again and paid more attention to what I was doing and got the zero. I think the key is to sit back and move your eyes around to different gradients, not staring at the same row for a long time. If you stare at the same row too long, it kinds gets burnt into your cones. Mike
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3599
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Mike's Software / FlashPipe / Re: FlashPipe settings not remaining as set.
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on: January 26, 2010, 02:04:34 PM
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Ugh. Finally found it! Turns out if you had changed your auto-rename options from the default (I didn't), it forced number (1) in my list to happen. When the new auto rename options were loaded, it caused FlashPipe to think that the auto rename options had been opened/changed and that automatically set the checkboxes back. v118 should fix it. Thanks for hanging in there with me. Mike
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