My Printing Adventures | Part 1: The Matte Battle (Patreon)

After returning from ANE, I had prints on the mind. I ordered a batch of 100 prints of six of my illustrations from my girlfriend (who owns a professional Epson printer), and she did an amazing job with them. They did pretty well at the convention, and it got me thinking about going full-scale with print-making and having a prints-on-demand storefront.

After researching for a couple days and looking through half a dozen or so prints-on-demand sites (and reading a ton of fine print) I was getting discouraged. I ordered a sample from one site that promised quality, but the product I received was so embarrassingly shoddy...  It looked like it was printed out of a $50 printer and it arrived very curled up, and I couldn't get it to lay flat even after a couple days under a very heavy box.

This didn't bode well, and it made me concerned about leaving the quality up to an outside company. So I began to look into getting my own printer and selling the prints myself, so that I could be sure that the prints came out looking good. Enter the Canon Pixma Pro-10:

Excitedly, I began to try out some test prints of my artwork. I wanted to go with a high-quality matte paper, since that's what my girlfriend provided for me. But I noticed something amiss right away... 

The large print here is a 13x19 test I made on matte paper, and the smaller is an 8.5x11 on luster paper. The darker colors were very rich on the luster, but looked dull and flat on the matte. I couldn't figure out why, until I did some more testing...

Canon has a special setting for the "Fine Art Matte" papers, so I tried that one out. And the blacks did indeed come out richer, but this huge margin showed up. I looked into it, and the Pro-10 has a "Photo Black" and a "Matte Black" ink, with the latter having much more density and showing up as a darker black. It'll allow you to use this premium ink, but not without enforcing an enormous margin on the paper.

I looked around the internet for some explanation and the prevailing theory is that this is done to prevent the edges curling because of all the ink, and to try and avoid a printer jam and damaging the printer. Apparently Canon printers are the only printers that do this, at least from what I could find out. There are some programs out there that can override the Pro-10 drivers and gain access to the nice ink and all of the page at once, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it, being such a printing newbie.

I was pretty frustrated because my girlfriend was able to produce deep blacks on matte paper without much fuss, and it seemed I wouldn't be able to replicate it purely because I bought the wrong printer. So my conclusion is that if you ever want to print on matte paper, go with an Epson printer or be prepared to waste even more ink and paper than I did tweaking with a third-party driver.

And waste I did indeed, as I tried to find a sweet spot while still staying within the artificial constraints given to me by my expensive new toy...

No matter what, I couldn't seem to get the blacks deep enough to match the print that my girlfriend made, who I don't believe spent more than 10 minutes tweaking the file. I then wondered why I was so hell-bent on sticking with matte paper, when the luster paper came out of the gate looking pretty damn good. So I decided moving forward, luster was the way to go.

This post is getting pretty long, so tune in next time for another exciting episode of My Printing Adventures!