Digital BW, The Print

You are, of course, comparing a $500 solution that does a very good job of making profiles, to ones that range from $1000 to $7000!


Thank you greatly.

Most excellent information. I was looking for some data on this,
mainly the number of LEDs and their colors. You've at least given me
the number.

Hard to believe it's six. Not 16, not even 12.

There's controversy in grating or prism based spectros over whether
you need 31 bands to properly measure color (like SpectroLino or
DPT-41), or if 16 bands and some interpolation (like Eye-One and
Pulse) but one thing eveyone can agree on, is that 6 narrowband colors
is definitely not enough.

I'd put 6 narrow band colors up against 3 good colormetric filters (as
in a digital camera based solution) and expect the 6 narrow band
filters to lose, every single time.

The only way a system like this approaches workability is if the
people who created the system use it to make profiles of multiple
paper/ink combinations using a better (read "somebody else's")
spectro, then use their "limited" spectro only to adjust these
profiles to minor variations in a particular user's printer. As far as
I can tell, this is what the origional (scanner based) printfix did,
to such a degree that you could only use it to "profile" a small
assortment of ink and paper combinations.

For B7W use, a definite weakness of LED based narrowband systems is in
their ability to judge neutrality.