Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

When I set up my Canon printer two years ago, the advice of the time was to use the XPS driver. Thus,  I created the targets for all of my papers, and then had the targets converted to ICC profiles using the Chromix Color Valet service.  So now that the advice is to use the standard driver, does that mean I need to have new ICC profiles made? I have had zero issue with color or image using the XPS driver.  The only issue I have had is the annoying inability for margins to be 100% correct all of the time (was not a problem with my old Epson printers). If there is no change in image quality and my margin issue is resolved, they I guess I am ok with moving to the standard driver.  Of course I have to factor in the annoyance of possibly having to have 15 papers (I pick based on image) re-profiled, which would cost a few hundred dollars (but also have to take into account the cost of the ink). Thanks in advance.

I've profiled several papers with both the XPS and regular driver and I see no difference in the output nor the profiles, so you should be fine using profiles created under the XPS driver using the regular driver.  I even compared profiles created using XPS vs regular driver and the profiles themselves were near identical: as identical as you can get given that they were different scans.

My suspicion is that the regular and XPS drivers produce identical output when printing through normal Windows printing programs and the XPS driver just has an extra "layer" that is used by Print Studio Pro.  The only thing you have to worry about with the XPS driver are those margin bugs.

Regards,
Mike

Thank you.