Setting up P7000 as a 6color printer

[aaronchan]

Hi Guys,

I have been working with CMYK printers for many years.
And I have used some RIP with CMYK contone mode with CMYK+ printer for quite some time as well.
But today, I have received a demo copy of Ergosoft RIP, which comes with neither CMYK contone mode nor RGB contone mode. That forces me to start to work in the CMYK+ printing environment.
As usual, I first perform linearization and individual ink restriction.
Here are my densities for each channel:
C & M: ~1.5
Y: ~1.0
K: ~2.0
Or & Gr: ~1.1
I used ColorThink Pro to determine where I should set my individual ink restriction as to how I do it with CMYK only printer.
But when I make a test print for total ink limitation, my paper, which is high gloss RC paper (for test), it won't hold ink more than 220, which produce very bad shadow reproduction. I was first thought maybe I was using too much Light ink in C&M, But no matter how much I've reduced in the dithering setting, the problem still exists.

2 weeks ago, I was trying with Wasatch RIP, which also happens does not have a contone mode for the Epson P7000 as well. And of course, I was facing the same problem with too much ink bleeding with very low TAC.

I have never had this kind of problem before. Does anyone have a successful calibrate and profile an Epson P7000 with halftone mode before? How did you do it?

Thanks
Aaron

 

[Puch]

You have to tinker a lot to be able to do that in halftone mode. I tried it with EFI Fiery XF driving our Epson 7900 and 4900 printers, finally giving it up, totally frustrated. I had a bit more success with PerfectProof 4 some years ago.

IMHO the whole thing depends on the granularity of ink limit controls. I don't know much about the current Ergosoft and Wasatch versions, as I've been playing with them 10+ years ago. If you have controls to finetune EVERY ink combinations (2, 3, 4, 5, 6 inks) - which must be a very large chart - then, in theory, you must be able to come up with a solution. If you have a limited number of controls, then the only way to go is to find a different kind of substrate, which can hold some more ink. I found tremendous differences between papers, regarding their ink holding ability.