DSF

Continuing my hate/hate affair with the ricoh driver(s)....

Printing reasonably happily for a few weeks, changed nothing, print heads fine.

First image using photoshop profile as usual, printed twice with same result. Second image using power driver prints ok. Makes no sense to me.

looks like the ICC profile doesn't like the gradient at all. If you soft-proof it in Photoshop using the profile does it look similar? I'm not really sure of the workings of Powerdriver as I've never used it.

Can I ask.....if the Powerdriver is printing OK, why are you trying the profile?

Powerdriver prints the image without the flaws but there is a difference in colour matching between the PD and profile. I only printed this in PD to see if it coped with the problem. In normal use the profile gives much better results.

I had a quick look at soft proof last night and saw a slight darkening when switched on. Checked gamut and there is an issue here as well which seems to coincide with the flaws. Gamut is not normally something I worry about as my normal printing is on a 4900 which has a very wide colour space. I guess the Ricoh may be a lot less.

Anyway I will start looking at soft proof and gamut as part of the workflow especially when printing clipart...

It still does not explain why PD was able to print without flaws, there has to be some sort of built in prifile.

From the limited amount I've seen of Powerdriver, I guess it has different profiles for different items. Am I right there is a way to choose different substrates in it? If I'm right, I could never understand why the various different profiles weren't released as individual files, for the non Powerdriver users.

Is anyone able to look if it's possible to extract the different ICC profiles from PD?

Otherwise, for the OP, I would recommend getting a custom ICC profile made for your Ricoh, which should help eradicate the problem, but also say that using proofing in Photoshop (along with having a profiled monitor) will help you no end.

Had a custom profile made last year. In this instance even soft proofing epson paper shows an issue so this is probably a fairly extreme scenario. For comparison I just printed it out on the epson and it is perfect so presume the driver/profile is able to adjust out of gamut colours very well. I am not trying to campare the two machines but it is just interesting.

Using soft proofing in PS, first image uses sublijet profile as supplied for the 3110. Areas in grey are out of gamut.
Next is custom profile for 3110, better but neither of these two profiles printed "correctly" without flaws.
Last is custom profile for epson, still issues but printed correctly.
Unfortunately we can't extract the profile(s) used in PD. I have also soft proofed a few other pictures and the difference between the canned profile and customised profile is quite clear and well worth the small outlay. In future I will probably consider using PD for graphics, clip art or any graduated colours.

Who made the Ricoh profile, and have you gone back to them to try and get it tweaked to improve on it?

Having compared the profiles on several other "normal" images I am happy with the results.