Awful Color on Epson 2200 after Snow Leopard Upgrade

Dan Perfect wrote:
Epson really need to take notice of the pro segment of their market which must be a much higher proportion of mac users than the domestic & general office...

Indeed. Trouble is, Epson doesn't seem to know who their professionals are. I was shocked to discover that Epson does not consider their 2200, 2400, 2880 professional models. Only the 17" and wider printers get "pro" classification. In many cases the 13" and 17" models have identical print heads, use the same UltraChrome K3 inks etc, That's the stuff that matters to pros. Not sure what size has to do with it. I guess Professionals don't make small prints.

I know 4 people including myself who use 2200s. All 4 are professional photographers. Personally, I have yet to come across anyone using one of these printers who isn't a pro, so Epson must have no clue who is buying their products.

Dear Epson: Here's one very good reason for playing nice with your professional customers. Do you have any idea how many printers we sell for you? Whenever friends or family need to buy photographic equipment, who do you think they call? I constantly have people asking me "what camera should I buy", "what printer should I buy?" and I'm happy to oblige. I'm sure every other pro gets the same questions. I used to tell everyone to buy an Epson. What I tell people from now on is up to you.

I'm shattered and appalled. I need to print a bunch of last-minute photographs on my R2880 and just went through **** trying to get the bloody thing to work at all ( http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10344989 ). And now I find my monochrome images have a magenta colour cast.

I've been experimenting with all the settings mentioned here, removing ALL my colour profiles, etc and it just won't go away. At least I have a packet of Hahnemuhle papers on which to print (small) image after image of magenta goodness.

Seriously, this is insane for a £600 device - especially coupled with the normal fiddly tolerance for loading different papers and incomprehensible driver UI.

So there's no magic bullet solution beyond downgrade to 10.5 (which really isn't an option for me)?

QuatermassX wrote:
So there's no magic bullet solution beyond downgrade to 10.5 (which really isn't an option for me)?

I've been following this closely on this forum and elsewhere for a while, and from everything I've seen all the workarounds compromise output quality in some way, so achieving the results you were getting under 10.5 looks to be impossible.

Rather than downgrading, if you have an another drive (or a partition on your internal drive) you could install a copy of Leopard on it and boot from there to do your printing. It will be a royal pain having to reboot all the time, but it's probably the simplest way of doing things, at least temporarily, while we all wait to see what Epson is going to do about this (if anything).

Hi - thanks, I really appreciate you coming back to this discussion. It's not a solution, but thanks for a positive course of action. You've saved me from going absolutely crazy.

Now I really should know the answer to this but ... I only have the DVDs that came with my iMac 24" (Leopard was installed already) - will it install on my external Firewire drive?

What a kerfuffle this all is!!

They should install fine on an external. I used a Leopard DVD from my friend's iMac 24" to install onto my external linked to a MacBook Pro. Just put in the install DVD, hold down option key when you start up. Then chose the install DVD to boot from, format your external using Disk Utility (MacOS Extended Journaled) and install Leopard onto the external. Then use option to boot in Leopard when the drive is plugged in.

It's not nearly as slow as I would have thought, and I just installed all updates and Photoshop, then I pull the files up directly from my internal drive and print.

I would recommend calibrating your monitor again, but this can be tricky, since your monitor brightness and contrast settings my change between OS's. I pulled the icc profile from SL into my Leopard drive, and the monitor seems to be pretty accurate. I do all my corrections in SL anyways, but I don't want to change my monitor settings every time I switch to Leopard to print.

I found this in the thread "?Epson 2200"

Re: ?Epson 2200
Posted: Oct 5, 2009 5:42 PM in response to: krabito

We will be coming out with a Snow Leopard driver for the Stylus Photo 2200 in the first quarter of 2010. The Gutenprint driver and the 10.4 driver will work, but you may have problems with Color Management.
Hope this helps. Syd (Epson Tech)

Because I like to torture myself, I attempted to install Leopard onto my 2nd-gen 10GB iPod. I only have one external Firewire drive that I use to store my 500GB of images and it can't be partitioned without erasing the whole thing. Ugh.

Well, one can absolutely install Leopard onto a 10GB drive with tens of megabytes to spare - but it won't allow me to install Photoshop directly onto an external drive. What a pity.

This of course means that because Epson's drivers for the R2880 are incomplete at best (or lawsuit-worthily defective) and I can't print B&W pictures that aren't a delightful shade of pink, I have to spend ££ on a new external drive. I suppose I could a new backup drive, but I really don't like having to purchase new hardware under duress.

Does anyone have an ETA about when this situation will generally be fixed? November? Sometime in 2010? Madness

Yes - spot on 😉

Bazzography, you nailed it. Epson has no idea who their customers are. Additional thoughts are on my blog.

hi folks. I'm waiting to get a new computer until I know my Epson 2200 will print correctly-- Apple just posted new drivers-- does it fix it? http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669#epson

Please report back to this forum-- nothing posted here for a while (by the way-- does anyone here know if the Wacom tablets work in Snow Leopard now?)
thanks!
ss

ssteuer wrote:
hi folks. I'm waiting to get a new computer until I know my Epson 2200 will print correctly-- Apple just posted new drivers-- does it fix it? http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669#epson

All the new and/or updated drivers on Apple's list are marked as such. It shows nothing new for the 2200, 2400 etc, still just the Gutenprint drivers. The fix for us will be brand new Epson drivers, not Gutenprint drivers, so there is no fix yet.

Strangely though, Epson's "Common Updater", which was removed from their 2200 driver page a few weeks ago, has reappeared. It's nothing new though, it's the same 13044.dmg file that was released in January 2008. We already know it doesn't work, so I'm not sure why they made it available again, and why they are still claiming Snow Leopard compatibility.

If and when they finally get around to making a new driver, it's hard to say if it will be delivered via an Apple update or not, so I would also keep an eye on their 2200 driver page here:

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/support/supDetail.jsp?oid=14402&prodoid=20306 147&BV_UseBVCookie=yes&infoType=Downloads&platform=Macintosh&x=25&y=12

Thanks-- I'll watch the drivers there-- and here. Hopefully soon....!

I'm not sure I'd hold my breath waiting for new 2200 drivers. I'm afraid that Epson doesn't consider it "current" enough to do anything. I certainly don't say I agree with this! Only that I'm afraid it's the reality of the situation.

On a much brighter note. I seem to have gotten the 2200 to work properly using the Epson Leopard drivers - the Epson11832.dmg - (and yes it says up to 10.4, but it also says Leopard elsewhere).

See my post [here|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10112356#10112356] and mine and others [here|http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10151680&#10151680]

I made a number of comparisons between 10.5x and 10.6 since I stared testing SL in March and while I'm not a pro on my prints I could see no problems with my photos processed through either CS4 or LR with my color-managed work flow.

However, others have reported that they either: couldn't get the Epson drivers to work at all; or had color issues with them.

It's pretty clear that whether and how well the 2200 works with Epson drivers is dependent on some factors that, are as yet, eluding us.

Steve

For anyone who needs to know, this is also the same issue with the 9600 ultra chrome. Am installing my old operating system for now, as I need to print for business. Too bad about Epson.