Epson R1800 prints dark

[gdeloach]

I have an Epson R1800 and it seems that every time I print the pictures comes out quite a bit darker than what I see on my monitor. I have a Dell 15" LCD monitor and regularly calibrate it with my Spyder 2.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

[SureFire]

Have you run the print profiler? If you run that (correctly), you should get 100% accurate results. I do anyway.

[ohenry]

Lots of ideas.

Start by explaining what software you're using, what color management you're using, how you print, what paper, what settings, etc.

This is good reading color management and color printing ... It's written for CS3, but there's tons of vital information regarding color management and printing.

[Eero Makela]

You need to reduce the brightness on the LCD

As per Eric
Epson 3800 Step-By-Step Printing Workflow


If you have a LCD display, I recommend setting your display calibration options to Gamma 2.2, "native white point" for the color temperature, and 100 cd/m2 for the target luminance. This last point is very important: new LCDs are capable of emitting a lot of light (and often are extremely bright out of the box). If you edit images on a super-bright display, your print will appear too dark by comparison. Even if your calibration software recommends setting the target luminance to a higher value (e.g., 120 cd/m2), I still suggest using a lower value such as 100 cd/m2.

[gdeloach]

Well, I have it figured out.

I downloaded the latest printer driver from Epson along with their newest ICC profiles and now I can't tell any difference at all between my print and the monitor.

Whoopeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!

Thanks for the responses.

[SureFire]

That would be the same as running the print profiler CD they supplied you with. It matches your user ICC profiles to the epson lookup tables and makes the custom profile for your media if you're using other company brands. So, I'm guessing you're using Epson papers, huh?.

Glad you got it worked out.

If you ever try other brands (I use Kodak professional papers too), make sure you run the profile CD. It'll make sure you get consistent prints across all mediums.

[gdeloach]

Actually, the driver that came with the printer was version 5.?? and the updated driver is version 6.52. Also the ICC profiles have been recently updated from that on the CD. The older driver and ICC profiles were correctly loaded and still giving me the dark prints. I changed nothing else but the new driver and ICC profiles and it corrected the problem.

I noticed on another board where there are quite a few people with this printer having the same problem. It seems that there are several things to try in order to correct the issue, but I got lucky and tried this fix on my own and it worked.

Thanks again, all.

[SureFire]

Not exactly what I meant, but that's okay. I still use the old drivers that were created from the profiler and they work perfectly. Regardless, I'm glad you got a fix in place. Running completely stock sometimes makes that easy with simple updates.