Adventurous Printing With Epson And GoPro

Well, you can't fault the logic of it. Buy an Epson inkjet printer and get a miniature adventure camera. The best of both worlds.

Go out and video yourself skateboarding over a cliff with a jet pack, wings, and a motorcycle attached - underwater - as you do...and when you are sitting at home safe and dry and comfortable...in your cast with the traction weights pulling your hip straight again, you can get the lady from Silver Chain to make some great A3+ prints of you.

Okay, that's more cynicism than Epson intended when they bundled the R3000 printer with a GoPro Silver edition action camera in a special offer, and you will probably do no worse that take pictures of the kids falling off the trampoline onto the concrete.

The printer is great - I have one and it hasn't failed in anything I ask it to do - gloss, lustre, or matte - the prints are what I expect to see and the thing is quite economical with ink. We use one to make shop advertising posters and it is as good as the commercially printed material the manufacturers send us. Plus we get to do it on the spot. Thoroughly recommended.

The GoPro cameras are the doyen of this sort of machine. Whether you are recording carnage on Russian roads or swimming carnivals back home, it produces sharp, spectacular footage of whatever passes in front of the wide-angle lens. There are any number of accessories to latch these to people, vehicles, and objects and you can work Wifi and remote operation in case you don't want to be attached to it when it hits the rock face...

Nurse! Time for my sponge bath!

Oh Myyyy....I FInd Out

Well, that'll teach me.

And isn't it always the case - the things that you find out for yourself are the ones that stick with you.

I have been using an iMac and a Macbook Pro for several years, resetting the colour video cards inside the computers with a Datacolor Spyder 2 Express each month, and printing out on Ilford and Epson paper. All good and I've been happy.

Then recently the Spyder 2 Express started to go weird and I replaced it with a Spyder 4 Express. Slightly different routine for the operation, but equally simple to do. I tuned up the home and the work computers last week and carried on blithely.

Today Dom handed me some files that were taken at last night's shop party. I banged them into the Macbook Pro and then out to the shop Epson R3000 so that some of the reps could have  paper prints. Ilford Smooth Pearl 6 x 4 paper.

Wow. Better than before. Accurate colours and NO colour cast. I think the Spyder 4 Express has done something really good for the system. What, exactly, I cannot say. And this on a standard paper.

Note: I also brought back some Fujifilm printing paper from Japan to test it. Only one print so far on what amounts to a super-quality glossy but again it looks as if printing has gotten to a whole new level of accuracy...with no especial efforts on my part.

These are standard goods straight off the shelf here in the shop - with the exception of the Fujifilm paper. I know the business of colour management and printing is said to be hard but this seems easy. Perhaps it is all just hear-say...?

I Pressed The Print Button, But Why Does It Look Like That?

It looks like that for any number of reasons:

a. It is an autochrome. Made up of dyed grains of starch bound onto a glass plate. With an autochrome any image is a good image and if it has survived the last 100 years without cracking or fungus you have a museum piece.

b. Your print heads are clogged. Run a nozzle check on your epson printer. if the little pattern of checking squares has missing segments, run a head clean cycle. Check again and repeat if necessary. Eventually you will have a full checking pattern and a clean print.

c. You have got a massive imbalance between what you see on your computer screen and what your printer is being instructed to do. Have you calibrated the monitor screen lately? if not, try one of the Datacolor Spyder range of monitor calibrators. Do it regularly.

d. Is your printer confused as to who is in control? Have you given it double instructions with your image programming fighting with the in-built printer control. Choose one. Turn the other off.

e. Is your printer aware what sort of paper you've dropped in it?  You could probably print on sultana bread toast if you set the printer head high enough, but would it make a baby portrait look good? Be sensible with your paper choice and load the appropriate profile into the printer before you start. If in doubt, stick to the manufacturer's own paper.

f. It's your eyes. Visine in each one and a night's sleep. If your image in the mirror in the morning looks as bad as the print, see your opthalmic specialist. If he looks as bad as the print, you may have to be content with life as it is.

Amps Plus Ohms Times Faraday Minus One Over EZ According To Epson

Electricity is found in many electronic devices, but not when someone steals the battery. This fact has been borne home here time after time. I am starting to think we only have one battery and it is being used in a remote control toy race car.

This may sound cynical, but it points out the absolute dependency we maintain for portable sources of power. Where once we could make images with simple ingredients like iodine crystals, silver-coated plates, boiling mercury, and 30 pound cameras, we are now chained to a lithium cell, a charger, a wall socket, and Collie power station.

I am only a little encouraged - it is impossible to steal Collie power station, and difficult to steal the wall sockets...but every other blessed thing can vanish in an instant. The electrical myths that are recorded on the memory cards can likewise be edited out by accident as easily as by Aperture. Just record lots of irreplaceable images on a big card and wait for fate to come calling. Remember all those "recover your images" programs that exist? They wouldn't exist if they weren't needed.

There are only three ways to ensure the longevity of your artistry:

1. Back it up on a million discs, hard drives, and solid state drives and bury them in steel vaults all over the planet. Protect the vaults with passwords. Write the passwords down on a paper and stick it on your fridge with a magnet. Preferable a kitten-shaped magnet.

2. Print it on real paper with real ink. Epson paper, Epson ink. Let the ink dry and store the paper in a clean dry place.

3. Take a libellous or scandalous picture and let it out to You Tube, Flicker, or Facebook. Your career may die, you will die, the Rocky Mountains will eventually be as flat as the Nullarbor, but that troublesome picture will still be circulating as fresh and foul as when you posted it.

But that is a diversion. We were talking about electricity. In our little cameras we only need a very little bit of it for normal purposes but as the cameras get bigger and the functions get more complex, more electricity is needed.Eventually we reach the point where the functions overtake the capacity and the camera refuses to take anything ...but if it did it would be magnificent. At this point you need to turn off the SAT NAV espresso maker with the portable hay baler. Leave the face recognition on because as you get older you need all the help you can get.

The Sacred Texts

Every religion has sacred texts - some are wrapped carefully in scrolls and put into velvet cases - some are bound into heavy books. Some are carved into the stone walls of temples. In our game they are either printed into little paper books or supplied on a CD.

Instruction manuals. Love 'em or hate 'em, you are eventually going to have to fish out the one that came with your camera or flash and read it...in many cases you will do this after the equipment has stopped working and emitted a puff of blue smoke.

Had you gone into the thing prior to this momentous event, you might have discovered how to avoid it. Most modern equipment will not self-destruct - you actually have to perform a series of incorrect things to blow it up. Of course if you are using a computer this does not apply - computers will wilfully throw themselves off the electronic cliff like expensive lemmings. They mutate when they are left to their own devices. And you can be sure that in a few months NO devices will work with them.

The dedicated reader of instruction manuals will discover that there are different levels of communication skill amongst the companies. I can genuinely praise Nikon and Fuji for their manuals, and Pentax are not far behind. The paper books you get with new cameras are plodding affairs  - not a lot of plot development and no dirty pictures to look at - but if you read them you will get all the facts you need to run the cameras. Sometimes the camera designers have been drinking at lunchtime but at least their sins are accurately reported in the books.

Not so with the instruction manuals of the Metz flash company. Their products are excellent - I have a handful of their flashes that have soldiered on for nearly 40 years and they still pump out the light. But the instruction manuals have been written by someone who was in command of the German army - possibly at Stalingrad. They are incomprehensibly complex for the pre-digital era, and worse once the shift to digital began. The only thing that saves Metz is the fact that the flashes can largely be left to work by themselves while you get on with it.

We've all laughed at Japlish and Chinglish advertisements and instruction books at one time or the other. Of course none of us write in Japanese or Mandarin to have our own mistakes seen. And the people in Japan or China would probably be more polite about it. Fortunately the writers of their technical pamphlets seem to be amenable to criticism as I have seen marked improvement in brochures from one year to he next. Mistakes now are nothing more than typos and have nothing of the howling humour of the 60's.

Will it get better? I hope so, as worldwide communication becomes more direct. For myself, I took as much instruction as I needed and learned a new skill from seeing Gary Fong show his light diffusers on video clips. But I still would like to have a book to carry in my camera bag if the equipment is complex. If only to provide tinder when I set the thing on fire...

Solving A Printing Problem - Banding

Recently a client mentioned that they were getting a bit of banding on their prints and wanted to know what could have caused it - and indeed what they could do to fix the problem.

My experience is that there can sometimes be micro-clogs in the heads of the inkjet printers that stop the full spray from going through. Sometimes it is a distinct banding, sometimes just a vague lack of definition and/or depth of colour. it is most often seen in dark areas of the print.

The Epson printers have a wonderful set of tools to deal with this. If you suspect the effect in a print, you go into the printer menu and ask for a nozzle check. It will fire the entire set through in a small test pattern and if you see segments of colour missing your suspicions are confirmed.

What to do? Ask the printer for a head clean - it will shake and flush the heads with a bit of ink and then you can re-test. Most times the problem will be gone in one go. You can ask for 3 power cleans in a row, but you have to wait a little between each one so that you do not damage the head.

Most times, if you print one little print each week that exercises all the colours, you never see settling or clogging of ink. Please note that inks do have use-by dates and it is wise to heed them. they do not go mouldy, like the cheese in the fridge, but they can settle out particles.

Please note that is you are getting banding on panoramic photos taken with some of the newer mirror-less cameras you need to set your shutter speed a little slower and move the camera around more smoothly.

If you are getting banding on street photos you are to be congratulated. See attached photos.

Uncle Dick

How Do You Go Bust Baking Bread ?

I watched the rise of the franchise boutique bakery here in Perth - the Brumby's and Baker's Delight and such - and applauded it all the way. At least I applauded with the hand that wasn't holding the jam doughnut. They have achieved a success that is richly deserved - because they make a good product that everybody likes and uses. No-one ever complains about jam doughnuts. Jam doughnuts are a standard of the industry.

I would have thought that the Ilford company was in much the same position as the bakeries - and I am speaking about the division of their firm that manufactures paper for inkjet printing. Dance how you wish, their Galerie Smooth Pearl and Smooth Gloss have been the standard of the industry for as long as I have been inkjetting. One thought of them as classic cash cows, wandering through the paper paddocks and yielding profit for the company whenever they were milked...

Such would appear not to be the case. the paper division of Ilford has gone bust. They are casting about in Switzerland looking for a buyer or some other solution to the financial crisis. Out here in the boonies we are gathering all the supplies of the classic papers that we can to ensure that our clients can continue to print. We also hope for a buyer solution, but of course we will also be looking at other brands.

I wonder if they have the same accountant as Eastman Kodak? Or the South Sea Bubble...

Uncle Dick

Shake It Up, Baby

A client last week asked a question about the use-by dates on the inkjet inks cartridges - how come they were there and how much notice should he take of them. As I use Epson printers myself, I could give him an off-the cuff answer. I was wearing a short sleeve shirt at the time.

The inks do age and might make for less-than-perfect printing if they are well beyond the date. Whether it would be particulation or evaporation I cannot say - I just would not use one well past the date.

Remember to shake it up, Baby, when you put a fresh cartridge into the machine.

I would also make sure that some little amount of printing was done each week - even just an A4 sheet of a multicoloured test shot would exercise the machinery and ensure that the ink flow though the heads was normal. Each Epson machine has provision on-board to do ink flow analysis and head cleaning and some of the bigger ones can do a very vigorous cleaning indeed. But it uses up ink and the maintenance tank capacity if you are doing it a lot - better to just print each week and keep the problem at bay.

If you are in the habit of stocking up big be sure to look at the dates on the boxes at home and use up the oldest first.

Oh, and paper. Far as I can see paper doesn't expire but if you store it badly you can get some odd results later on. Keep the flat sheets flat and they will stay...flat.

Big 1000 - The Blog Post That Turns The Corner

Social media is like social disease - everyone has read about it, hardly anyone has seen it for themselves, and no-one wants the old-fashioned treatment for it. The little umbrella...

Writing for it requires a combination of Charles Lamb and Woody Allen; serious essay and one-liner. Plus a dash of Ansel Adams - plonkingly complex technical advice clothed in  art. It is an exhilarating experience when it goes well but very sad when there is nothing inspiring here in the shop. That is also when it becomes most dangerous - you start to think on a tangent and pretty soon the irate customers start beating on the windows with rocks.

We have a company slogan: " We Love Photography." and by-golly we do. Everyone here on the floor is a photographer and we actually do what we talk about  - in most cases with the stuff we sell to you. It is the best way for us to get knowledge - if we can do it we can show you how.

Sometimes we can show you how not to do it, as well. Every one of us has approached a job at some time and shot it in the best way we could and had it look like a horrible mess in the end. Sometimes we have been consultants for other people doing the same thing. This sort of experience is wonderful, particularly if you survive and the warrants expire.

Are we doing better than the anonymous writers on the forums? I think so - in the end we can actually demonstrate the gear in front of the customer, and even if we need to have a shop-huddle to all figure out how to make the device work, at least we all learn.

We are always asked which camera or lens is best. The answer is, of course, yes. Or no, depending upon the prejudices of the questioner. Some people really do want advice - some just want a fight. Quite a few want a place to eat their lunch when it rains. In the end, we ask as many questions as we answer, and sometimes the customer actually does their own answering. Then we can argue and eat lunch.

It is fun, the business of selling cameras. Not as much fun as social disease, but you don't get itchy in awkward places in hot weather.

Uncle Dick

Heath Robinson vs Rube Goldberg

Or how I learned to love photography.

Old photographers will remember the sorts of things that we did in the darkroom to produce the special effects. Weeks spent gathering equipment, chemicals, containers, tanks, agitators...months spent sealing the space against the ingress of light - while letting the most aggressive of the poisonous fumes escape...hours spent trying to get the negatives to register accurately in the gate of the enlarger or he paper to register accurately on the easel. Then the clean up afterwards. Scrubbing the stains out of the bathtub before the wife discovers them...

Now we just download a plug-in app and click the mouse. All over in a second and no scrubbing. All the fun has evaporated.

Well, no, it hasn't. Not by a long way. We now have the wireless link and the WiFi and the iPhone  and the hot spot and all the other horrors of modern electronics. In the interests of saving the lives of copper miners by reducing the amount of cables that are needed, I have prepared a plan for the best selfie ever.

1. PocketWizard transmitter in pocket firing a...

2. Camera with a transmitter firing...

3. Several speedlights wirelessly, in full TTL, with frosting and sprinkles, while the camera is...

4. Recording the image on the WiFi card that sends the image off to the computer that...

5. Sends the image automatically to Facebook, Twitter, and Google who then pass it on to...

6. ASIO, NSA, the FBI, the KGB, Mossad, M.I.5, and Julian Assange while simultaneously...

7. Sending it to the Epson 3000 printer that whirs away while...

8. It goes to the cloud where it then rains down on your iPad, and iPhone.

All this within a fraction of a second. No smells, no stains. The bathtub is pristine. Your bank account has a hole in it but that is the price of progress. Cheer up - with on-line banking you don't even have to go to the local branch. You can stay at home and press the shutter release a second time.

The first shot will cost you $ 8900 but the second brings it down to $ 4450... a snip!

Epson Wish To Pelt You With Money. Hold Still.

Big Epson printers work like small Epson printers - well. They are consistent winners for clean reproduction and accurate media handling. They are fast. They are economical with ink. They can work all day every day.

And now they can put money back into your pocket.

Epson have announced a factory rebate for purchasers of the Stylus Pro 7900 and Stylus Pro 9900 printers if they are ordered prior to October 31st, 2013. Do the deal now and you qualify for a factory rebate of:

1. $ 1000 on the Epson Stylus Pro 7900 printer - this is the 24" wide model.

2. $ 1500 on the Epson Stylus Pro 9900 printer - this is the 44" model.

Here is the chance for the professional printer or the company who needs the best in roll or flat work to get in on the ground floor  and get the cash for it. Don't hesitate.

Money Coming Back To You From Epson

New Epson cash back promotion for you today - If you need to print up to A2 on thin or thick stock - with the finest of inkjet ink - the Epson Stylus Pro 3880 model attracts a cashback payment from the Epson people of $ 250.

This promotion will run until the end of September 2013. You buy from us and claim your reward from Epson on-line.

If you don't quite need as large a size, but want all the benefits of the Epson ink set and their expertise in easy colour printing, may I suggest that you get an Epson Stylus Photo R3000 right now. This will print to A3+, do rolls and CD discs, and also open for thick stock. It will print through a wifi network if there is someone in your house young enough to know how to connect it, and from regular USB or ethernet if you are old enough to remember Nixon...

There is a cashback from Epson of $ 200 for purchase of a printer and if you choose to purchase a printer AND a set of replacement inks, you can increase that cashback to $ 400. But you have to get your skates on - this promotion finishes at the end of this current month.

My own experience with these printers has been very positive - as it has been with Epson papers, Epson scanners, etc. I use the R3000 regularly for the paper output from my Hot Rod Honey series and for wedding pictures. It really does do the business of translating what is on my computer screen to a print in hand with a minimum of fuss.

Tuesday Night Fever - With Nikon and Kristian Dowling

For those Perth professional and advanced amateur photographers who missed the Nikon Night 2013 with Kristian Dowling and are curious as to what went on, here is the report:

1. It rained persistently.
2. We met at the Subiaco Arts Center at 6:30.
3. We ate, and drank. Yes. Good bar, good kitchen.
4. Kristian Dowling took pictures of the guests arriving in Hollywood style - then we printed them out on Epson paper with two Epson printers.
5. Julie and Sarah from Nikon introduced Kristian and he told us of his work in Hollywood.
6. Then he showed us how to get his distinctive style of photo using LED, Profoto studio flash, and Nikon speed lights. Sarah was the model.
7. Saul and Howard entertained the crowd with sales talk and giveaways.
8. We packed up and came home.
9. It rained persistently.

Now it appeared to me that Kristian knows what he is about, and was able to explain it pretty well in a small space of time. I think he is a man well able to think on his feet - as the job of a Hollywood shooter would require. I enjoyed his lighting talk greatly. I am biased towards the use of the Nikon system because I use the Nikon system so it is good to see how well it can operate in pro hands.

It was a fun evening. Roll on the next Nikon day - or evening. Thanks to Julie and Sarah and Kristian. And Saul and Howard. And the staff who served us the food and drink.

To give you a visual idea of the evening....

"Stayin' alive..."

"We must be there..."

" Grip and grin! "

" Mama Mia atsa spicy meatball..."

" Beauty and...and...and..."

" Behind you! Look behind you! "

" I just had to wait until he did..."

" Him, Officer. That's the one..."

" Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey.."

Glamour!

Here Come De Judge - With Epson And Eizo

Did goe to the Fremantle Camera Club last night and was greately entertained.

It is always gratifying to be asked to a club to judge competition photographs as it is a sterling opportunity to crush the spirits of the hopeful while selling them more equipment. Plus you get coffee and a biscuit at half-time.

I have expressed reservations about judging in " Here All Week" but we have to remember that even the barest reservations sometimes cover vast oil fields and for the better sort of coffee and biscuit I can be as oily as required. And in truth, I learned three things of value last night.

The competition pictures for projection were sent to me on a CD and I looked at them on my home monitor, making notes as I went. In many cases I was pleased with the overall image but thought them too dark, and made recommendations based on this. Then when the images were shot up n a good screen with a good Epson projector I saw how wrong I was. I had my monitor at home set too dark. Lesson one. Perhaps it is time to go and get an Eizo monitor.

Lesson two was watching the display of the printed images in a separate room. The venue had inadequate down lighting but the clever club people went and got Bunnings halogen work lights, directed them onto the white ceiling, and got an even and flattering overall illumination. As prints are made or ruined by their illumination, this was a very good idea.

Lesson three was the home-made illumination box used to present the prints one at a time for the audience to see during the commentary. I was the commentator so the speech was nonsense, of course, but the images looked wonderful. If you cannot make a dedicated illumination frame, get a Grafilight and do your best.

In the end, the standard of the piccies was very high, and I hope I was able to assess them correctly. The winners shook my hand heartily and the losers chased me down the lane with torches and pitchforks so I think the evening was a huge success.

A Quicky After You Finish Work

Well, just one.

When you have printed your Ilford or Epson paper on your Epson inkjet printer and laid the print aside to dry for the requisite period, what do you do?

1. Forget where you put it and set a sloppy coffee cup down on it.
2. Find it the next day lining the budgie cage.
3. Trim it accurately and mount it for the club competition.
4. All the above in that order.

I find it is helpful to wander around the workroom looking for my glasses until I stumble on the print. I do not enter club competitions but nevertheless I try to keep a printed archive as well as the electric images in the hard drive. This has saved my zebra on two occasions when I deleted the very files I needed.

Separate note: Do not purchase gold ingots, contract marriage, or edit electronic images after 10:00 at night - it always ends badly.

But to the point. We sell a rather natty Promaster rotary trimmer for the No.4 stage listed above. It seems to be square on the paper guide and blade path and is sturdy enough for regular use. Better than a pair of scissors and a concentrated expression on your face...

Hurray For the Free Bee!

Here are a couple of announcements to gladden the heart and fatten the wallet of Camera Electronic customers. The Free Bees have flown back to the shop courtesy of the EIZO and Epson people.

EIZO make monitors - some of the very best in the business - and from time to time change and improve their model line-up. But they are not all serious colour-accurate technological experts - they like to go play sometimes and they want t you to do so too. Sooooo,

The EIZO people will be offering a FREE GoPro Hero white camera outfit valued at $ 269 with all ColorEdge with CN orders. This will apply to models CG246, CG276, CG223W, CX240-CAL, CX270-CAL, and CS230-CAL.

This offer is on right now and will go to the end of financial year - the 31st of July 2013.

Now the Epson people make printers and scanners. I know - I own one of each - and I feel myself particularly qualified to announce the next Free Bee Actually it is a Cash Back Free Bee and that is all the sweeter.

The Epson Photo Stylus R 3000 printer is a wonderful A3+ inkjet printer. It will do rolls, disks, sheets, and slabs. It has useful-sized ink cartridges that are not world-shatteringly expensive and the quality of the printing straight out of it is superb. Getting a correct print out of it is the least fight of any printer I have used and to some extent makes a lot of the complexity that is peddled about printing irrelevant. that is a the wrong thing to say when we are supposed to be experts....but the pleasure of just dropping the paper in and getting the print out is wonderful.

Anyway, Epson want to sell more, and to do so have offered $ 200 cash back if you get one of these printers between now and the 15th of July 2013 - you send them proof of purchase before the 30th of July 2013 and they send you real government money that you won't get arrested for spending. If you elect to purchase  a set of additional inks for the printer at the time of initial purchase - these are the 157-series - you get back and additional $ 200 - making $ 400 all up.

Now if you have bigger ambitions and want a heavier printer that will go up to A2 while still doing rolls, think of the Epson R 4900. This will get you a cashback of $ 500 in between now and July 31 2013.

SO - buzz in and gather up the honey....errr... I mean money.

Uncle Dick

Engage Automatic Warp Drive One, Mr Sulu...With Epson

Good news for those of you who have been following my experiments in the Scientific Ruritanian - the anti-gravity ray is finally working. Once I get the dog down off the ceiling I will be able to publish the final paper. Until then it may be as well to avoid walking under him...

On another front, I finally got to try one of the features of the Epson V700 scanner this weekend, and can report on the operation.

The V700 is a flat-bed scanner that has been specifically designed to accommodate transparent and solid copy from the tiniest miniature format to the 8 x 10 size. I have owned on for 5 years and have used it extensively to mine the archives of my negative and slide collection. I scan and save the images into the digital bag and then use the Adobe Photoshop Elements program to modify them.

In many case the modification is confined to cleaning the spots and dust from the scan. My negatives and slides have been stored in proper sleeves for the last 40 years but even the best storage is a little subject to contamination. Indeed, the act of taking an old negative out of storage and placing it in the dedicated scanner plates can attract some dust through static electricity. The newest negs have little to bother them, and the big sheet film negs are so big as to render small dust unexceptionable, but the 35mm and 120 ones from the 90's generally need some spotting.

Of course spotting these days is mouse or stylus-based using the spot feature of PSE10 and is very effective - you cannot see where the program has erased the problem. But it all takes time as you navigate around the image at 100% and zap the spots. Then you go out to page size and invariably you have missed one, so you zoom in again...

The Epson V700 has a feature that is designed to relieve this problem. There is an ICE circuit built into the control panel that supposedly removes the dust automatically. I tried it last night with the experiment of doing one scan on a moderately clean image and then spotting it manually - timing myself - and then repeated the scan on the same image with the ICE turned on.

At this juncture let me explain what I think the ICE is doing - if I am right it is science and if I am wrong it is sorcery. It makes a regular preview scan as pre normal - you inspect it and choos the size and crop. When you engage the ICE and tell it to scan it goes down your image once, then resets itself - with an audible click that is distinct to the ICE setting - and runs slowly down the image again. I suspect that it is looking at the surface of the film from a slightly different scan bar angle - hence the click - and then supplying the computer with two images to compare. the computer takes some time to do this before it spits the final image to wherever you have requested.

The time taken to do this is at least double that of the un-cleaned scan, and in some cases it may be more than double. But we are not talking about very long scans here, either. In any case in the end you have an image that is entirely free of dust - and here is the good part: I inspected the manual clean version and the auto clean version side by side and cannot see any loss of resolution. Just loss of dust.

The time taken to do the ICE clean is no longer - and in the case of a heavily contaminated surface can be much shorter - than the business of doing it yourself and then spotting away for 5 minutes.

Tonight I shall make the experiment of deliberately putting a fingerprint on the non-emulsion side of a negative and see if the mechanism can cope with the whorls and spots. I also have several negatives of shame that never received proper washing and have chemical contamination on the surface - it will be interesting to see what it makes of them.

Starts First Time - Epson

The sad news is that my old printer carked it. I let a batch of out-of-date-ink sit unused in it for too long a time and the head clogged up. None of the easy solutions cured this, and the repair technician at the printer place found that the replacement of the head would have cost nearly as much as buying a new printer - decision easy.

I selected a slightly smaller printer than before - in the time I used the original I never really exploited the largest size of paper. I could quite easily use the next size down.

The good thing about the next size down is that it is cheaper - and does a little more in the bells and whistles line. It can print roll paper for panoramas and also has a tray that handles CD disks. As it has the sort of font feed that can cope with thick material, it seemed to be a good choice.

Epson Photo R3000 is the model. I takes the same sort of ink as the previous printer, though the cartridges are somewhat smaller. This means a higher per/ml ink cost but a faster throughput of cartridges and less chance of the ink staling in the system.

Paid my money - full price too* - took it home, opened the box, unpacked the goods, and read the instructions. That is the beauty of Epson - the instructions are printed as well as disked, and they assume that the new user is a boob - and write accordingly. Even the dimmest of us can do it and I did it...

Once the thing was hooked up, inked up, and disked up, I tried the simple option for connecting it - the enclosed USB cord. There are simple instructions for using it with a Wifi link but I thought that wire would be more reliable - plus I like the option of something that I can trip over in the dark.

The command pathway from my computer to the printer seemed to be similar to the previous printer so I called up and image, sized it, and asked for the same sort of colour handling as before. First file went perfectly and to my eye is precisely the same as the monitor screen. Four more images confirmed this fidelity. I could not be happier.

I also reflected that the paper was helping a lot - I selected Epson Premium Glossy in A4 size. The printer knows this paper and has the correct profile as part of its basic structure. I might change a few times to other well-known brands or surfaces, but for me the A4 Premium Glossy looks to be the best option. I don't do soft romantic matte shots...except when I do soft, out of focus shots that I miss the exposure on badly and am too ashamed the throw in the bin. Then I talk myself out of it.

So that's the report. Epson works. Works well. Works FIRST IMAGE through the printer. Can't ask for better than that.

* 'cause I get tired of people trying to skinflint the price of luxury items down to nothing. I want to do the job well and I expect to pay for the goods. If I wanted to do cheap printing I could make a stamp out of a potato and use a school watercolour set...