CIS for Epson

[callumw]

Not yet. My next investment (that I need to do to keep me from going insane) is new laptop and small netbook. Budget £1000. And THEN profiling device

There is a cost effective temporary solution while will save a lot of paper/ink/time waste while trying to get ok results

Rather than purchasing a profiling system, you can get custom profiles made for you fairly cheaply.
You have the ink and probably already know what papers you want to use, so all you need to do is ask a profiling person/service to make custom profiles for you.

They'll email you a colour swatch and instructions on how to print with no colour profile applied for each type of paper.

Let them dry for a day then post the prints to them. They scan and make the profile for you and email you back the .icc files ready to use.

Job done

All that's left is to correctly calibrate your screen so everything matches and you're all set. The profiling service will probably offer this too, but tbh, you're probably cheaper just buying a basic screen profiler rather than having them do it for you.

Basic screen profilers such as a Pantone Huey start at around £53 and you should be profiling at least once a month. New screens will need to be more frequent (weekly), but once they burn in then they become more stable.
http://www.callumw.com/go/PantoneHueyPRO

The next level from the Huey is the ColorMunki which profiles your screen + printer paper/ink combo, but come in at around the £320, so more of an investment (although far more useful).
http://www.callumw.com/go/ColorMunki

I'm lucky in that I have an X-Rite i1Photo (same people that make the ColorMunki) which I use to create custom profiles for my paper/ink. It was expenseeev, but I'm able to create 4096 swatch colour sheets to profile against (the ColorMunki creates 2x50), but I get a slightly more refined profile with it as a result.

If you were nearby then I'd be happy to swing by and help calibrate your screens for you, but I see you're up in Luton. It may be worth checking on here or a local camera club to see if there's someone nearby with a ColorMunki or Spyder that you can borrow ... or perhaps a local rental company will hire one out?

Here is a cheezy video on the ColorMunki:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu0qUb4J5A4

And here's a very useful webcast from Adobe on how to profile images within PS using your custom .icc for your ink/paper combo (this helped me a lot when I started doing my own printing).
http://www.callumw.com/go/AdobeProfiling


Hopefully it's useful info to someone that may be wondering about creating their own colour corrected prints. If you know a lot of this already then apologies

 

[Sebastian]

UPDATE:

After initial problems described earlier, my CISS seems to work OK Now.
The quality of prints, straight out the box, with no colour correction, is very close to what I see on my calibrated screen - which is really good.
So far so good !!

 

[inkexpress]

The printer error message usually appears becuase the magnetic sensor that detects when the scanner unit is open / closed is not positioned correctly.

I am unsure how the City Ink Express ciss is fitted but with our system you have to move a magnetic sensor from inside the printer casing to outside. A bit of blutac to secure it in place does the trick.

Sometimes you have to move the sensor a little bit to gain a good connection.

Hope this helps.

Alex @ Ink Express