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Wide Color Gamut

All three printers in our shootout produce expanded color gamuts compared with previous pigment-ink models, thanks to additional inks and small droplet sizes. They also ship with accurate color profiles. So you can expect saturated and exacting colors, plus richer, deeper blacks that blow away those found in silver halide printing papers.

In the past, we've recommended setting the Adobe RGB color space as your working color space in Adobe Photoshop (or any color managed imaging program), instead of the default sRGB space, in order to get the highest-quality prints from six-ink or higher-capacity color printers. That's because the sRGB color space clips many of the saturated colors captured by film/flatbed scanners and DSLRs, while the Adobe RGB space is a closer match to the color gamuts of these input devices and 6-color ink jet printers.

But now, with their expanded color gamuts, these three printers can produce colors outside the Adobe RGB space, most noticeably in highly saturated yellow and red colors [Graph A].

So with these printers, we recommend using the Wide Gamut RGB color space [Graph B] as your working space in Photoshop to avoid clipping original digital camera colors. You should also convert the RAW files you shoot into 16-bit TIFF images and save them with Wide Gamut RGB tags in order to improve the color quality of prints made on luster and glossy paper surfaces. If you use a high-end flatbed or film scanner to digitize art or film, the ProPhotoRGB space may be your best choice to prevent color clipping.

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