How good is Silverfast's printer profiling

[Ron Marshall]

Silverfast has scanner software used to profile printers.

Has anyone here tried it, or know how it compares to profiling with a spider?

[Ron Marshall]

From their website it seems that a color target is scanned, then the print of that is scanned and a profile for the particular paper is automatically generated. If this is the case and it is as good as handheld colorimeters then it will simplify the process.

[Tyler Boley]

some of the very first entry level print profiling packages years ago were scanner based. Monaco EZcolor, Horses which became ColorVision which became Datacolor... I was a beta tester for some of them.
They can work ok, bit given how affordable the ColorMunki and the Datacolor products are, I'd be inclined towards a task specific device driven solution. It would be worth seeing some real world profiles to compare, if you can get your hands on some.
Tyler
http://www.custom-digital.com/

[pherold]

One of the main problems with "scanner-based" printer profiling is that your printer will necessarily be confined to the color gamut of your scanner.

http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/Color_...ofile_building.

I don't remember where I got this, but this is Bruce Fraser commenting on this from a few years back:

The good news about scanner-based profiling tools is that they can be made to work really well. They're much easier to use, much quicker, and obviously much less expensive than the instrument-based profilers. But a scanner isn't a colorimeter, let alone a spectrophotometer. Most scanners have filter sets that are really turned to photographic dyes. That's what they were designed to scan. And the more different what you're scanning is from photographic dyes, the likelier it is that the scanner is going to see something quite a bit different than you do. Scanner metamerism is a big issue, where the scanner sees a different color from the human eye.
There are some problems with the directions that come with most of the low-cost profilers. They generally tell you something like "Scan at the default settings of the scanner," and that can be a recipe for a disaster. If the scanner, like many low-end scanners do, does some kind of image specific automatic adjustment, you really need to turn that off, or you're not going to be able to get consistent profiles out of it.

[John Hennessy]

On my Epson 4000 I was trying to use some of the new papers like Moab Colorado Satine, but with Moab's profiles, but there was a strong color cast.

I already had Silverfast to run my scanner so I opted for the printer profile module ($100 or so) and I like the blues much better and, by eyeball at least, b&w is neutral.

It works by first profiling the scanner as usual with an Silverfast reflective target. It (almost) always finds the IT8 target itself and reads the proper data file from a bar code on the target.

Then, with Silverfast, one prints a color patch page with the printer & ink to be profiled with of course all the printer's color functions turned off (just as one would print from PS). After drying that it is scanned and Silverfast reads the file it creates and builds the profile which the user names. There is also a profile editing function.

The printer profile button is not present unless one first sets the scanner to reflective mode.

Compared to the lower-end printer profile hardware and software, where one one must read each patch manually, this is fast and painless. Compared to the high-end programs that are automated, this is dirt cheap.

But I wish I had some way to read actual prints to see if they're really neutral because I don't quite trust my eye.