DTP-70 vs. EyeOne: US Automation as good as Swiss Elbow Grease.

Good news: It would seem that the DTP-70/Monaco Profiler 4.8 combo will immediately produce RGB profiles that are in the same league as those of my old EyeOne Match system. And, to my knowledge, nobody has ever faulted the quality of the EyeOne profile engine, although measurement errors sometimes crept in due to the ruler design (that's fixed, now).

I've been printing the Pixl Test Print rendered perceptually on my Epson 2100, with the Epson Matte profile I made with the DTP70, and an old i1 profile. Xrite manages to pull some more definition out of the shadows, Gretag yields perceptibly better yellows, but otherwise the two prints are really very close. I don't think anyone ouside color's magic circle -artists, designers, fashion people and us photographer chickens- would notice the difference.

However, the DTP-70 profile was generated with just one button-press to read the half-page with 343 patches, which took about a minute, while the EyeOne profile was made with two sheets of patches. That's a dollar more of ink and paper, one print more to run off and a decent amount of elbow grease to scan it in.

There are some much more sophisticated testcharts available in Monaco Profiler, but given the excellent initial results I haven'felt the need to use multi-page charts — yet: Epson's enhanced matte paper, with its reduced gamut, is not exactly the best candidate for a discriminating RGB test.

Also, I've been looking at yesterday's Colorchecker test in daylight. Yesterday's commentary is confirmed: Nice, with some imperfection on the hard red patch and on the light skin patch. Extremely good density match on the neutral patches.

I also did some due diligence by talking to Paris color consultant Gerard Niemetzky. He tells me his clients are happy with the DTP-70.

So far, so good, as Andrew Rodney wrote me once. Now, off to bed. Commentary on Apple's Aperture app should be up on Publish.com tomorrow.

UPDATE: I will be meeting with a fellow color geek in a week's time, he has the high-end Gretag package, and we will jointly run comparison tests with Profile Maker Pro. I prefer to do it this way, two pairs of eyes are better than one.