ICC Profiles

For Papers Stocked by Image Science

There are three main types of ICC profiles for inkjet papers - canned profiles, stock profiles, and custom profiles.

Stock profiles are free if you've bought paper from us, and are often a good way of evaluating a paper. But for the best results, you should always use a custom profile.

In order of quality from best to least:

Custom Profiles - the best approach

The best quality approach is always custom ICC profiles for your printer.

If you are at all committed to a paper, the path to the very best results is definitely a custom profile - a profile specific to your printer's behaviour with that specific type of paper. Differences between printers, especially the lower end consumer models (anything that prints up to A3+ and below), is suprisingly large - easily measurable with a spectrophotometer. Thus a profile for someone else's printer may well be close, but will not give you the very best results. And if you're buying fine art, archival papers, you're probably looking for the very best results.

Information about the Image Science Custom Profile service.

Stock Profiles - the next best approach

The next best approach is probably a stock profile - we've made these using average samplings of several printers here in Australia. While not as good as custom profiles, they're usually good enough for evaluating a paper. They're not specific to your printer, and will not give the very best results, but will almost always be better than canned profiles (see the next section).

Stock profiles are free if you've bought the paper from us. Just send us an email requesting the profile you want - and if we have a profile for your printer/profile combination we'll send the profile straight back to you. NB we don't have every possible combination available, so if we can't find a match for your printer/paper, you'll have to opt for a custom profile or a canned profile.

Information about Image Science Stock Profiles (free if you purchased your paper from us).

Canned Profiles - better than no profile!

The final option available to you is canned profiles - these are profiles made by the paper and/or printer manufacturer. Typically, while better than nothing, these are not wonderful in terms of quality. They're pretty much specifically designed to reduce support calls to the manufacturer support lines, rather than giving you the best results in terms of quality. They may be sufficient to evaluate a paper but are no subsitute for a good custom profile.

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