[Openicc] Drop size calibration

[Graeme Gill]

Robert Krawitz wrote:

> This tuning is on a per-printer, per-drop size basis; it doesn't
> involve actually modifying the dither algorithm.
> 
> The other thing is that I suspect that not every combination of
> printer, paper, resolution, etc. will wind up getting properly
> linearized, so I want to have reasonably good estimates of the drop
> size out of the box.  I could always simply set sizes of 0.25, 0.5,
> 1.0 for everything and be done with it, but then a lot of resolutions
> on a lot of printers will look rather ugly until someone gets around
> to doing a lot of work.  This method is a lot faster than what I was
> doing before (when I had to recompile the driver and print a whole
> bunch of test strips and then try to estimate matches to make any
> changes at all to the drop sizes).

If this is the situation, then yes, allowing for the different
dot sizes this way seems to be pretty efficient. The color quality
gap between a printer that is controlled this way, and one that has
been calibrated and profiled is likely to be enormous though.

While it's impossible for any vendor of printing devices/software
to calibrate and profile every possible combination of mode and
media, there's an expectation  now that at least a useful set of
such calibrations and profiles will be provided as a fallback.

Graeme Gill.