Choosing Media Profiles

[Posterboy]

Hello,

I was hoping some of you guys could drop some wisdom about how to choose media profiles, and then customizing them.

I have an XR-640 and use Versaworks

Currently I scroll through the list in Versaworks and choose whatever media name best describes the stock I have. If the print looks ok, then I have a list I keep on my screen of what profile to use with what media.

Doing that works, but I'd like to do better. I've spoken to my Roland rep and he made noises about ICC profiling and dollar figures that were hard to justify.

Any advice or links would be appreciated.

 

[bob]

Outraged protests of the buck profilistas in these waters notwithstanding, a profile the works to your satisfaction with one particular media most likely will work with whatever media.

Here in this shop there are two, count 'em two, profiles and one of them hasn't been used in years. One profile that started out in life as Oracal's 3651G profile and was trivially tweaked a bit serves just fine for whatever media has thus far been loaded into the printer in the past lustrum or so.

Find a profile that works for you and use it. Don't complicate things unnecessarily with, shudder, profiles or each and every media. It just isn't necessary/

 

[Snydo]

I totally agree with Bob, I use almost a dozen different medias regularly and an Oracal 3641 profile for all of them. The colors are fine, the prints are crisp and clean, for me all that changes are temps and either uni or bi-directional depending on what I am printing(and printing on) at the time. We have Epson Surecolors and HP Latex printers and colors stay very consistent across the board.

If you are printing fine art, color critical stuff then maybe you need to worry about the 'perfect' profile but I and my boss prefer printing jobs not color charts.

 

[Ragnabrok]

Canned profiles only work if your shop has the same environment as where the profiles were made. If your shop is humid, and the profile environment was not, your prints are going to be mottled. Same as the other guys, the profile to use is the one that looks the best, even if you are using a clear vinyl profile on banner.

 

[splizaat]

We exclusively use 3165G Profile on 99% of medias, and banner1 on Banners. Although when we went to this 7 color setup+white on our VS540i, reds are magenta with this profile. I've complained and they won't listen....so we use GCVP if the art has red.