Amongst the most picky of users with ink-jet printers are photographers, and these often are the folk who often have little to no direct printing experience but who expect exacting results. Today's high-end aqueous-based printers are designed to cater for this market sector, with extended ink sets containing up to twelve individual inks helping to achieve the gamut and depth of colour required.

The photographic sector is also a stickler for consistency, with series and limited edition prints needing to be the same from the first to the final picture, whether they're printed simultaneously or during a prolonged period of time. Many photographers are, quite rightly, pedants who believe that they are not only responsible for generating the original image but, also, for printing it and, in this digital age, this process has been simplified considerably by removing the necessity for chemicals and darkrooms.

An on-board spectrophotometer simplifies customised profiling

As so often happens, colour raises its head again as being a slippery fish which can be difficult to control. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that, these days, digital cameras generate numeric data whereas, way back when, it was the photographic film which controlled the colour. Unlike laboratory circumstances for testing the efficacy of colour, the average person has to rely on his brain's interpretation of correctness, so having on-board technology helps.

The CIELab colour space is deemed to be the closest to human vision because it has a wider gamut than RGB and CMYK, and is not device dependent. So, by the time an image has been taken in RAW state from a digital camera, manipulated in Photoshop as an RGB file, and output as CMYK, it isn't difficult to see why colour can wander off its intended path. Applying a profile certainly helps but there still remains the need for an on-board method of ensuring that output will remain true to its settings. Having a spectrophotometer in the printer helps to achieve this.

In simple terms, this enables the device user to create his own custom colour profiles, broadening the range of media that can be used. How the spectrophotometer does this is by 'liaising' with the colour management system which makes the necessary adjustments to simplify the on-the-fly creation of custom profiles for different materials.

Unlike a densitometer, a familiar tool to printers, which is used to measure the optical density of transmitted and reflected light, a spectrophotometer measures the intensity of light, or spectral values, and quantitative colour reflectance. But most users of photographic wide-format output devices aren't printers, and to be able to have a system which calibrates, linearises and creates custom ICC profiles in real time has proved to be a significant benefit to their colour-conscious working practices.