Is the EZprints printer profile up to snuff?

jfriend

I've been recently challenged by shooting a soccer team with very red uniforms and I'm trying to find a shooting and RAW workflow that gets me images for the web that are in-gamut for EZPrints so what the parents see on the screen in smugmug is similar to what they would get if they ordered prints while keeping as much red detail as possible, while preserving as much of the natural color as possible and while not requiring individual tweaks on every photo (I'll probably produce ~400 photos for the season - 20-30 per player).

That led to this thread on dpreview which led to this comment by Iliah Borg that suggests the EZPrints profile is both old and small compared to sRGB with a conclusion that there are much better printers out there that could print the reds in these images much better than this profile indicates EZPrints can do and can come a lot closer to the whole sRGB gamut than this profile indicates.

I know Iliah can be controversial, but he's also smart. What do you guys think? Is this profile up-to-date? Is the EZPrints gamut up to snuff with modern printers?

Andy

jfriend wrote:

I know Iliah can be controversial, but he's also smart. What do you guys think? Is this profile up-to-date? Is the EZPrints gamut up to snuff with modern printers?

I'll put it on my list of things to discuss with EZP this week. FWIW, EZ has some of the lastes devices out there, John

Durst Lambdas, Durst Thetas, and Pollies. In addition to the Fuji Frontiers.

Thanks for the post. I'll be back to you in a few days' time after I noodle it with the lab.

jfriend

Andy wrote:

I'll put it on my list of things to discuss with EZP this week. FWIW, EZ has some of the lastes devices out there, John

Durst Lambdas, Durst Thetas, and Pollies. In addition to the Fuji Frontiers.

Thanks for the post. I'll be back to you in a few days' time after I noodle it with the lab.

That's good that they have some of the latest devices. I wonder if the profile you have on your site is out-of-date then? I'll watch for further info later in the week.

Andy

jfriend wrote:

That's good that they have some of the latest devices. I wonder if the profile you have on your site is out-of-date then? I'll watch for further info later in the week.

Our profile is not out of date.

But -the lab is working on creating a new profile, and guess what - you and I are going to test it. Are you ready?

Email me and let's get something going fast okay?

Thanks! :jfriend

jfriend

Andy wrote:

Our profile is not out of date.

But -the lab is working on creating a new profile, and guess what - you and I are going to test it. Are you ready?

Email me and let's get something going fast okay?

Thanks! :jfriend

Ready when you are. Email sent.

Dr. Know

We at EZ Prints have worked on a new profile for a few months, exploring opportunities to create a more accurate, larger and more colorful profile. We used the new iSis XL Spectrophotometer made by X-rite, which we believe is best of class as well as the Gretag Profile Maker version 5.0.8.

We based this profile on a 4000 point sampling and have seen some great results. This profile translates into a much more true color with less contrast color casts. We will work with Andy and jfriend on some sample tests to validate our findings and the enhancements.

The current printers we utilize are as follows: Imaging Solutions Fastprints, Durst Thetas, Fuji Frontiers and Noritsu Large format machines.

We are always in a mode of continuous improvement in all aspects of our business, and welcome any feedback you have...

All the best,

Dr. Know

cabbey

Dr. Know wrote:

We are always in a mode of continuous improvement in all aspects of our business, and welcome any feedback you have...

It would be really awesome if you kept a copy of the icc profile for your service bureau at a consistent location on your site, especially if you are continuously improving your capabilities and periodically refreshing said profile to keep it current. It would absolutely rock if I could go it http://ezprints.com/profile/ and always see what the most current version of the profile is.

(and if you're looking for test images, feel free to use this one: )

Andy

cabbey wrote:

It would be really awesome if you kept a copy of the icc profile for your service bureau at a consistent location)

Well, we actually keep it on our site - and the one that we have out there is the current profile, and the one supported and guaranteed by us

It's here.

cabbey

Andy wrote:

Well, we actually keep it on our site - and the one that we have out there is the current profile, and the one supported and guaranteed by us

It's here.

heh, that was actually a suggestion to Dr. Know to put it on ezprints.com. Afterall, SmugMug isn't the only way to get print from them. As awesome as smugmug is at customer service, and there's no one even half as good as y'all are , you don't own the printers, you don't do the maintenance, you don't do the "continuous improvement" that was mentioned. (Unless there's something about the business relationship between smugmug and ezprints that the rest of us don't know about. ) So it really only makes sense that folks should be able to download the definitive profile from ezprints.com, hence the suggestion to the Dr.

jfriend

cabbey wrote:

heh, that was actually a suggestion to Dr. Know to put it on ezprints.com. Afterall, SmugMug isn't the only way to get print from them. As awesome as smugmug is at customer service, and there's no one even half as good as y'all are , you don't own the printers, you don't do the maintenance, you don't do the "continuous improvement" that was mentioned. (Unless there's something about the business relationship between smugmug and ezprints that the rest of us don't know about. ) So it really only makes sense that folks should be able to download the definitive profile from ezprints.com, hence the suggestion to the Dr.

They do have it on their site here. Not particularly easy to find, but it's there and when I checked a few days ago, it was the same one that Smugmug had on their site.

Andy

cabbey wrote:

heh, that was actually a suggestion to Dr. Know to put it on ezprints.com. Afterall, SmugMug isn't the only way to get print from them. As awesome as smugmug is at customer service, and there's no one even half as good as y'all are , you don't own the printers, you don't do the maintenance, you don't do the "continuous improvement" that was mentioned. (Unless there's something about the business relationship between smugmug and ezprints that the rest of us don't know about. ) So it really only makes sense that folks should be able to download the definitive profile from ezprints.com, hence the suggestion to the Dr.

I disagree, I want our customers to get the profile from our site, where they are getting their prints from. It's our responsibility to keep the profiles up to date, and we do. I am in constant communication with our lab, Cabbey, on a daily basis.

Thanks.

cabbey

jfriend wrote:

They do have it on their site here. Not particularly easy to find, but it's there and when I checked a few days ago, it was the same one that Smugmug had on their site.

Wow, yeah, I spent a couple hours looking for it, even tried google with a site filter.

Andy wrote:

I disagree, I want our customers to get the profile from our site, where they are getting their prints from. It's our responsibility to keep the profiles up to date, and we do. I am in constant communication with our lab, Cabbey, on a daily basis.

Thanks.

And that my friend is why we love smugmug around here.

But seriously, my whole point in posting was for the non-smugmug customers, which as jfriend points out, are covered, even though I couldn't find it when I posted.

jfriend

cabbey wrote:

Wow, yeah, I spent a couple hours looking for it, even tried google with a site filter.

But seriously, my whole point in posting was for the non-smugmug customers, which as jfriend points out, are covered, even though I couldn't find it when I posted.

Yeah, for some reason EzPrint's site seems to not be covered by Google. I couldn't find it with Google either, but did find it the old fashioned way of looking for a needle in a haystack.