2003-07-06

The Canon S9000 has been my printer of choice for about a year now; it makes prints up to 13x19" in 4-5 minutes at a very high quality level. The only other photo printer in its class is the Epson Stylus Photo 2200, which is widely used by professional photographers to make very high quality photographic prints. One of the claimed advantages of the Epson 2200 over the Canon S9000 is that it can be profiled so that its output can be calibrated to a known standard. This is important to professional photographers, since accurate color matching between the monitor and the print is very important if you want your print to look right the first time you print it. However the Canon S9000 can also be profiled and calibrated; here is how to do it:

The first thing to do is to go to the printer driver settings and change the Media Type to the closest match to paper type you are going to use. (For glossy papers, I use Photo Paper Pro. Use common sense here...) Then change Color Adjustment to Manual:

Then click the Set button to the right of Color Adjustment to bring up this dialog:

Make sure Enable ICM is unchecked, and Print Type is set to None.

Now you have turned off all of the S9000's internal color calibration, and can use an external profile. I won't go into the process of making a profile here; there are many software packages that let you create one yourself, or you can have your printer professionally calibrated with profiling services for the very best results. You will have to follow the instructions from the profiling program or service to create the profile. If using custom profiles, you need a profile for each type of paper you use. Once you have the profile created and installed on your computer, you can use it when printing in color managed programs like Adobe Photoshop 7. Here I am about to print a document with a custom profile for my S9000 printer and Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy paper (print with preview from Photoshop's menu):