mrsogmor

I recently sold mine due to a lack of cash I now regret it.I also have the normal 80mm Model.Look out for the meter being faulty .There are very fine wires that run from the lens front where you set the Film ASA and the camera body, these tend to break.Also check light tightness of the neoprene gasket on the body.As stated above the transport is the weak point on these cameras.However I had my 80mm model serviced and cleaned by Plaubel a few years ago and it came back like a new camera.It wasn't actually all that expensive when you consider you effectively have a new camera.The camera Transport was beautifully smooth after the service.I had the shutter done as well as the meter cables replaced and a hot shoe fitted.Its a top camera and I deeply regret selling it.As stated above its easily serviced by Plaubel themselves in Frankfurt, very nice people as well.You may find kenrockwell dot com useful for general Info on Plaubel makina's, look under equipment.Cheers mike

Hi William, yes I did eventually solve my problem.I reinstalled everything, including Photoshop 7.0.Also my printer was delivered with Epson software called Gray balancer which you use to calibrate the greys in B&W printing and it works great. BUT make sure you switch it off when printing colour. I still get posterized Print Previews which appear with all printer profiles except with those from Epson. They do not however have any effect on the final print or at least since I reinstalled everything. Also check your Firmware and install the latest.Printer must be on and in a ready state, that means with paper loaded in order to update the firmware otherwise it says that the printer is not ready which i found really confusing.So to recap this is how my setup now looks.Photoshop Color Space is Abode RGB 1998,In the printer setup Page I have Custom and have saved settings for the profile which I use,more on that later.On the advanced button there is"No Color Mangement" selected.Superfine ,1440,Highest detail.Papaer is premium GlossyPaper (250).In the print page I have color management selected, source color space is Document Adobe 1998,and the Print color space is the profile which I use which is a Generic profile which I bought from ddisoftware http://www.ddisoftware.com/printerprofiles/#available it was cheap and I find it much better than the Bill Atkinson profiles available on the epson site. I can recommend this company. Anyhow the profile is called Epson 7600 PGPP V2 and the intent is Peceptive. Please not that all these terms are rough translations as my print driver is in German.With this set up I get the best results so far . Having said that it would definitly be worth getting your machine calibrated from one of the many companies who offer this service over the net, you print it out and send it to them and they make a profile and send it back per email. Considering the cost of the hard and software and the experience needed to create a gretag profile its a brargin. Hope this helps, ps I print B&W with the profile made with the grey balancer and its spot on.

I have had both with my Epson 7600 the spyder is great but alas the printfix was disastrous, my advice is to forget it and save yourself some money and have a profile made for your printer professionally.See my post about posterized print with Epson 7600: http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00680F

Thanks to quentin, yes you,re right but my problem was that I also got posterized prints when i printed them. But alas having had no time or paper to test the printer since I installed the latest firmware and driver from the Us site I have now returned from a weeks holiday and have just spent a rather sucessful day printing at LAST.I have found the generic profile i bought from Digital Domain Inc to be somewhat better than the bill Atkins from the Epson website.Thanks to all who have contributed.I stand by everything I have said about the Printfix product as it still produces posterized shadow areas.

PS not my photo just one I found on our network purely for demonstration!

 

Cheers Mike<div></div>

Ok I have downloaded the Epson driver and installed on another PC without the printer attached. Its possible trust me then I downloaded Bill Atkinsons profiles and installed them and Photoshop 7 and set everthing up as I believe it should be following Bills instructions now when you print with preview in the Printer driver the results are just the same as I have at home "Posterised" try yourself and see.You don,t even need to own the printer as its not even attached the driver still produces the print preview.The following is set in the printer driver, Premium glossy Photo Paper (250),Color/B%W Photo,Custom,No Color Management,Superfine 1440, High speed,finest detail,print preview box ticked,Next comes the printer dialouge box which has color management selected and the Document source is the document RGB then the Bill atkinson profile in the dropdown box,9600 PrmGlossy PGL1 Std v3.icc selected with perceptive rendering intent, then the box for compression is selected(Tiefenkompensieren in German) and then I press print and the result is the image posted above try it yourself and see?????<div></div>

Hi Ethan, many thanks, I forgot to say I will take you up on the offer of sending some prints to the states.It will be interesting to see what transpires.

 

thanks again Mike

I have decided I will try another PC and install photoshop and all necessary drivers and calibrate the screen and then see what transpires. I will keep you all informed although it will be after Saturday 11th OCT.

Thanks Mike

Thanks to Joe and Ethan for responding, let me answer both in that order.

 

Hi Joe

 

While being somewhat dissappointed it does on the other hand produce B&W prints that are superb. That said the color with the Profile from Epson that came with the printer gives fairly acceptable prints.Just. However I often read about others who rave about the potential of this printer which alas I have yet to achieve.I starting to believe there is a software problem related to Windows or the Epson driver or both. Or is it a case of Dual profiling??? I,m gonna go the �Reinstall everything route�.

 

Hi Ethan,

 

thanks for your response. Just to clarify everthing I will run through my set up. Epson 7600 with Epson Ultrachrome inks in fact only the second set! One strange (to me) thing is it seems to use the Light Magenta at about double the rate of the other inks.I have the latest Firmware which I downloaded from Epson USA last night 10/01/03 and installed successfully along with their latest driver, the English variant appears no different to the German apart from the version number is higher.Monitor is calibrated with a Colorvision Spyder and Optical, I have configured the printer port not with LPT 1 but using an Epson ECP,EPP driver which came with the printer seems to have made it print at about twice the speed albeit with ther result that both processors are at 90% for the greater proportion of the printing time.With regard to a blocked nozzle I don,t think that is the problem remembering that it prints fine with the Epson profile which came with the printer, its actually when the image gets as far as the Print Preview box that it becomes �posterized� that,s before the ink hits the paper and yes when I print I get just what I see in the preview box.

 

All this leads me to believe that the problem lies in the software, somewhere between windows XP and either the printer driver or the way that the profiles are interpreted in the operating system as you point out the Bill Atkinson profiles should be printable and not in fact �on another planet� or at least one would think! I can,t believe there can be such a difference between bills 7600 and mine and I haven,t read any other posts with this problem??? As to your profiling service I will probably take you up and send some prints to the US so I can have the profiles made professionally but what I would do if they too had the same result??? I have already spent a small fortune on paper and the PrinFix product etc moan moan� Anyhow thanks to all who have responded I,m off to Paris on Sat 4th so I won,t be responding to any posts for a week as of Friday evening.

 

Thanks again Mike

Hi Steve , download profile inspector from here???

 

Yes I have tried every known variable including the ACE and the microsoft ICM modul and all to no avail!

Thanks for the help its all very interesting

 

Mike

Thanks again Steve hers the Epson Profile that works well just for comparison.

 

Thanks Mike

Hi Steve,

 

Thanks for your response I,ll be posting the profiles as soon as I find out how? Question if the Bill atkinson profiles are made on not so shoddy sofware then why do they also print so badly.??? I like the idea of an algorithim. Can Colorvision be so blatantly marketing software that quite frankly does not work period???

 

Thanks again Mike

Sorry for all the spelling mistakes!

 

ONE last thing all the above profiles with the exception of the Printfix look "acceptable" when I soft proof them in Photoshop but by the time they get to the Print Preveiw they have the above results

( see links to pictures) I mean they don,t even resemble what I see in soft proof! Has anyone any ideas ???

Sorry for all the spelling mistakes!

 

ONE last thing all the above profiles with the exception of the Printfix look "acceptable" when I soft proof them in Photoshop but by the time they get to the Print Preveiw they have the above results

( see links to pictures) I mean they don,t even resemble what I see in soft proof! Has anyone any ideas ???

Tahks again to all, here,s the same image with the Bill Atkins Premium Glossy Profile, it too is "posterized" I mean there is certainly something strange when they are all so off the mark. Bill I assume uses fairly good profiling tools so why this result.???

These profiles are not posted on the German Epson site by the way and the driver and firmware files are also different. Question is the Language the only difference or are the North American machines different than the european ones ??? well yes it would seem strange...<div></div>

Thanks Ethan for your interesting response,

I,m taking on board what you say seems to make a lot of sense to me. However with regard to Gretag Eye One I must say i,m fast loosing confidence in profiling software altogether and the Gretag product is very expensive. I might even pay someone to profile for me.I have to say that it seems in the world of software it never seems to do "what it says on the packet" which in the days of my youth was called darn right L***.I mean Colorvision market this product with emphasis on the 7600/9600 range. Tut tut Colorvision.I even was foolish to try their helpdesk to be told that I would have to tweak the profile with the sliders in the sofware. Well I can do that also blind in the Epson driver why do I have to fork out nearly 300 Euros to do it with theirs??

moan moan.. Thanks again

Here,s one with the Prinfix profile just for comparison in fact its decidely the worst of all.The other bad one being a generic Epson 7600 profile I bought from Digital Domain INC.

 

Thanks again<div></div>

Hi all in the previous I posted a photo of the fending posterized print in the Epson print viewer so here,s one with the Epson 7600 profile again in print preview just for comparison, this is how it prints

 

Thanks for looking mike<div></div>

Hi Quentin thanks for your response, yes the posterisation is quite bad and appears mainly in the shadow areas and whats more the print has an overall milky look about it. Yes I have all the correct settings for the making of the profile and the printing with the said profile regarding "no color management" but to no avail. I have also read two books on color management in German and English and consider myself reasonably clued up on color management., but alas I am trying to upload an example in my potfolio page to give a visual representation of the problem. Thanks again Mike<div></div>

I run a Epson 7600 in Switzerland (German driver)with windows XP with

a dual processor 2400 AMD SCSI machine. Its Fast. BUT I have tried

many many times to makes profiles for this machine and every time

results in the same output.The print is what can only be described as

posterised. The profiles that are supplied with the printer are

pretty good but in my quest for perfection I decided to buy Profiler

plus from Colorvision after having sucess withb their Optical and

spyder which I consider a good product. The Profiler plus was a

decided failure so I returned the product and decided some time later

to try their Print Fix product which I think is not cheap! No matter

what combinations , and I tried them all, I used, it was always the

same result.Posterised prints, I mean the profiles weren,t even in

the same ballpark as the Epson profiles and no amount of tweaking

with the slider controls helped. The same problem occured with the

Bill Atkins profiles on the Epson web site as did one Ì bought over

the net albeit a Generic for a Epson 7600. The question is are the

Firmware updates posted on the Epson American and German Sites

considerably different??? and can anyone help me with this problem or

have you experienced it with any of these products.Do you have to

assign the profile to the printer object in printers and fax devices

in Windows XP or does this matter. I suspect a problem with Windows

over Colorvision, it seems the profile is being applied twice or over

the top of another ??? is this possible??? Lastly does anyone have

experience with the Epson Gray Balancer as I have found this quite

useful for Grayscale prints but does it still apply its also when

printing color???? Could this be the source of my woes???

I think my last resort is to try a reinstall of all my imaging

software, Photoshop,Silverfast,Optical,PrintFix,Printer Driver and

profliles! Help if you can....

Hallo from an unhappy camper. I too have this problem with my Epson 7600. Although the profiles from Epson seem quite good I decided to try Profiler Plus and then Printfix from colorvision. I gave the profiler Plus back and wish I could do the same with the Printfix since all it seems capable of is making profiles which are quite frankly POSTERIZED and it cost a fortune. I have been ripping my hair out for six months now till I havent got much left. Must I really by a RIP for the thing??? Spec,Windows XP, with calibrated screen Optical (GREAT) Photoshop 7, Photoblack ink and Epson Premium glossy. Ps the profiles from Bill on the epson site where terrible. Can anyone help.Has anyone tried a profiling service?? usually costs 95$???

As far as I am aware the "G" adapter allows you to use an RB67 back on this camera

I once tested a seris of press lenses against RB67 lenses paticulary the 65mm on the RB and the 75mm on the Press the only difference I could find was the price save to say that the RB is multicoated and will handle flair a great deal better. Also I had sharpness problems with the 6x9 press b&w negs in a devere 203 and 504,I was at college at the time,film flatness with these glassless carriers seemed to be a problem as moisture could allow film to curl even over short exposure times in the enlarger, Be warned!I almost gave up on this camera until I printed a colour negative and was blown away by the quality. I now use a Fuji range finder and there is certainly a difference but not what you would expect. Look at the work of british landscape photographer John Davis and see examples of the Mamiya at it s best alough I believe he used the 50mm wide angle with it's inherent DOF and therefore sharpeness.