Does Epson's direct memory card printing suck?

(GeekBoy) wrote in message . com...
I have a Canon S50 and Epson Stylus R300... two great products, in my
opinion. However, the prints I get when I print directly to the R300
using the card reader or Epson software are way too rich in color --
too saturated... the flesh tones are all off, clothing looks
saturated, etc. But if I print using the Canon software, the prints
come out perfect. What's up with that? Any ideas? I would think
printing using the printer's software, or even using the card reader,
would produce the best quality prints... but it turns out that the
best prints are printed using the camera's software???
Thanks for your input!

I don't have the R300 yet but I am considering buying it, and I have
performed several test prints on it in the store from my Canon A75. I
have the same problems: prints way oversaturated, swung way too far to
the orange/yellow. Unfortunately, since I am using the store model,
there are a lot more tests that I am dying to try but I can't, and I
don't want to buy unless I know these problems are ironed out.
However, I can always suggest my hypotheses to you. These all apply to
card printing, because as I said I haven't ever hooked one into an
actual computer.

(a) I have tried printing with the onboard saturation control set one
step downward. But I haven't tried with the saturation control set two
steps downward. Any improvement?

(b) In the onboard "More Options" controls there is also an "Automatic
Correction" feature which presumably will read the image data and
auto-correct before printing. I have tried this accidentally set to
'PIM' (which shouldn't work because Canon doesn't support PIM), and I
have tried it set to 'EXIF' (which should work) ... the prints were
identical in either case. But I haven't tried with the automatic
correction set to 'None'. If you care to try that, does it improve the
memory card printing any?

(c) Do the saturation controls have take effect only when 'Auto
Correction' off? It is possible that manual settings for Brightness,
Contrast, Saturation, and Sharpness are ignored in favour the
automatic process which covers the same territory. In fact I suspect
this is true since the desaturation setting I chose seemed to have no
impact on the image -- but I haven't been able to do a test.

(d) Perhaps you could address another concern I have with memory card
printing quality. If you print at the highest quality directly from
your memory card (you can choose highest quality in the onboard
controls), and also print at the highest quality from your computer
software (perhaps use the Epson software so that the images will be
identical), and then look at the dot grain VERY closely with a
magnifying glass or a loupe, are the memory card printed dots any
coarser or more obvious. I only ask because when I look at the R300
output with my loupe and compare it to the output from my old Stylus
Photo 780 (which is supposed to contain inferior technology with half
the resolution), the dot grain is a lot more obvious on the R300
printout. Since it makes no sense that Epson would downgrade their
technology, I wonder if the memory card printing resolution is limited
by not having a computer's vast memory available to calculate the
finest colour dithering possible. Do you see a difference under a
magnifying glass?

These are important question that I have been investigating and don't
yet have answers for. So far, you are the only other person I have
seen who is asking them.