you may remember that Bruce Dayton requested samples of work for printing on an Agfa D-labs digital photographic printer in his area to compare with high quality inkjet printer output. i sent him seven images on CD-ROM, each in Photoshop and in JPG format, for trial printing at roughly 8x10 size. accompanying the CD-ROM were printouts i made on my Epson 1270 printer on Epson Professional Lustre Paper. the images represent a sample of my recent work, all shot on 35mm film, scanned on my Nikon 4000ED film scanner, and tweaked in Photoshop 7 to my liking. the operator who received and printed my files did not look at my prints for color reference. they looked at the files and did their best job of producing a quality print. overall print quality is excellent. i don't know whether it was coincidence or not, but the operator chose to use Lustre finish paper too, so the paper finishes were essentially identical.
according to Bruce, the operator had no color profile to work with for their printer so they were unable to do exact color matching. i supplied my images in sRGB profile and if they had a profile for conversion or they sent it to me, i could have sent my files in the Agfa D-labs profile. that should ensure better color match. as it was, the prints are different in color, but not a great deal. the tendency is toward yellow/green compared to my Epson prints. the difference is a matter of taste and if you had not seen my prints, you would not see anything worth commenting about as far as color is concerned. for absolute color accuracy, the operator would have to look at my prints as reference or to have the files come in already set to the correct color profile for the photographic printer. shadow detail and highlights rendered fine with basically identical results between the inkjet printer and the photographic print. i looked at the 7x10 prints with an 8X loupe and compared the two. the dot pattern is clearly visible in the inkjet prints but there is no dot pattern visible in the photographic prints. it is just possible to see the scan lines from the lasers, so overall resolution is excellent. there are some differences in edge detail though. for some reason, the D-labs prints show slightly less detail, as if a small amount of blurring was applied. also, if there are dark edges against light backgrounds, there seems to be a small amount of hard edges added that are not in the inkjet prints, sort of like an small amount of unsharp mask. looking at the prints at normal viewing distances, the D-labs output has a slight more snap to it, a subtle added sharpness, because the edges are slightly sharper. one of the files was blown up to about 12x18. on that print, the places where the hard edges showed up are softened but the subtle tone changes are lost. there seems to be some image processing taking place. between the original file and the commands to the lasers that is causing this. the original file shows a more gradual edge and it appears that way on the Epson print. however, i have to say that this is looking with an 8X loupe on a 12x18 print. i would have no trouble being satisfied with the quality of the prints i received. owning a large format Epson printer means i can produce the prints i want up to 12x18 with excellent quality. i think it is possible to get excellent quality too from the D-labs printer at the same sizes. color matching is the only sticking point, but that is a procedural and training thing that the operator needs to know about if you want to blind submit files for printing. Herb...
