Five-minute profiling with the DTP70

Apart from some tiny irritations listed below, Monaco Profiler has speeded up considerably after I installed it on my G5. I now need just about 5 minutes to make an inkjet profile with the half-page chart, and that time spans both measuring and computing the profile. I now feel that I've got this system sussed - it's time to do some real printing rather than just Colorcheckers and standard test pages to check out the profiles. I've been printing some portraits of a friend's son on Epson Premium Glossy, not at all recommended or supported on the Epson 2100. My most important criterion is skin texture, and the kid's skin tone looks ok on the prints.

I had a phone discussion with Steve Upton of Chromix yesterday, and he makes his inkjet profiles with at least a thousand patches on his slow Gretag Spectrolino/Spectroscan systems. I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing, though - when I was younger I did a lot of neural net training and I learnt that when you use too many data points for training a net you can get overfitting. Once I've written the first Publish.com article about the hardware, I'll start to play around with changing parameters in the software, and test profile quality with large and small charts, dense cubes and sparse cubes.

Detailed DTP70 lab journal.:I installed Monaco Profiler on my G5 dual 2.5 with Tiger today - the computer I call "Fanjet". I encountered some minor software issues which I hadn't seen on the Powerbook under Panther. Profiler wasn't seeing the dongle. I found the dongle installer in a directory, installed it and everything started working properly. It seems that the dongle driver didn't install by default ! Also, there's some strange interaction between Monaco's screen profiling reminder and my screens, carefully profiled and matched with ColorEyes, are having their assigned profiles ignored at reboot. So I have to go into Display Preferences and reset the screen profiles to the ones I want. More entertainingly, the Xrite mail system has apparently blacklisted gmail, so I can't send those nice people mail easily and report these small glitches.

Oh, and by the way, I found my old Colorchecker under some socks, and it doesn't quite match the new one.