Q: Printing with Epson 4000

[mercphoto]

Have a friend with an Epson 4000, and he's going to let me make some needed 16x20 prints on his printer for the estimated cost of ink and paper. Rather nice of him.

Will be printing from within Photoshop. How many DPI do I want to uprez to for this printer? 240, 300 or 360? We're not using RIP software, such as EZPrints does, so I believe uprezzing will be of some help. Will most likely be using my Fred Miranda Re-Size Pro plugin to do the uprezzing.

Thanks.

[rutt]

I have one of these printers. I rarely use from inside of PS, though, as I've found that I get *much* *much* better results with ImagePrint. I don't do any special uprezing then and get really beautiful prints with all sized inputs.
So if your friend has ImagePrint, use it. The Canon drivers are far behind in terms of image quality. If your friend doesn't have ImagePrint, try to talk him into it.

When I did use the Canon drivers, I didn't do anything special before printing except my ususal color correction and sharpening. It takes a lighter hand with sharpening for images this size than for online sharing, of course.

Perhaps I missed something by not uprezing? Maybe I wouldn't have thought ImagePrint was so much better? But I know a lot of prepress pros who think this also.

[mercphoto]

Good advice about ImagePrint. However, I highly doubt he'll spend the money on a RIP package. I might run an experiment at not uprezzing, and uprezzing to 360dpi, see what happens. Seem to remember seeing that Epson's prefer 360 over 300, for some reason.

[rutt]

Good advice about ImagePrint. However, I highly doubt he'll spend the money on a RIP package. I might run an experiment at not uprezzing, and uprezzing to 360dpi, see what happens. Seem to remember seeing that Epson's prefer 360 over 300, for some reason.

Get him to try the ImagePring demo. He might get hooked. The difference isn't even subtle. I was a major sceptic before I started to use my 4000 seriously.