Tom, There is one other option with the 3880. Eric Chan, one of the Adobe software engineers who works on Lightroom, posts ABW profiles on his website: http://people.csail.mit.edu/ericchan/dp/Epson3800/index.html They work quite well and if the paper you are interested in is not there he can make a profile for you relatively cheaply. He uses more patches than QTR does. Fortunately, the two main papers I print on: Ilford Gold Fiber Silk and Museo Silver Rag have 3880 ABW profiles. Check out his site as he has excellent notes on the 3800/3880 printers. Alan From: argyllcms-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:argyllcms-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tomasz Danus Sent: Friday, May 20, 2011 1:29 PM To: argyllcms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [argyllcms] Re: Simple and preliminary profile for epson 3880 Hi Alan, Thanx for your quick reply. My existing profiles are made with Argyll so it should be v2 Number of patches - well I did profiles with under 1k and 2,5k patches and, I maybe imagine that, but I think later are a notch better to my eyes. If no one come up with better advice I might play with CM and QTR as advised here: northlight-images co uk / article_pages / bw_printing / bw_print_colormunki html Instead of playing with preliminary profiles but for now colour prints are a bit more important to me than B&W. I haven't done any extensive tests or a lot of prints using Epson ABW - I might try that as well, before playing with QTR to see if there is any change for better. Any other views more than welcome;] Many thanx, Tom -- t.danus@xxxxxxxxx Skype: Ithilstone On 20 May 2011 17:51, Alan Goldhammer <agoldhammer@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: I think you need to ask the question whether your existing profiles are deficient and if so in which color regions. First you need to check whether any of the existing Epson profiles you have are version 2 or 4 profiles. I don't believe version 4 profiles will work with Argyll (I know that my ColorMunki software creates Version 4 profiles as a default and they are not read by Argyll). Personally I think you are using too many patches for creating Epson 3880 profiles. I used 980 patches with my ColorMunki and got very fine profiles as judged by a visual test print (I have an i1 spectro on order to refine these profiles). One other point in the p/s, you will get better results in B&W printing if you use the Epson ABW print driver. It gives you a deeper black and better (but not perfect) linearity. There are ways to profile the ABW print driver for improved linearity using QTR or having a custom profile made. At this point I don't believe Argyll supports creation of this type of profile though I would like to see one given the amount of B&W printing that I do. cheers, Alan