Best Canon PRO-300 driver settings and print detail?

What factors affect fine print detail

Is there a ‘best’ print setting for printing?

Looking at the settings for the Canon PRO-300, there are several print quality settings in the driver and there is often also the choice of how much image detail to send to the driver from the original image.

This article repeats a process Keith also carried out for the Epson P700/900. Rather than repeat it here, have a look at that article as well for more technical aspects of the testing and what it looks for

• P700/900 print settings for detail

There are also articles looking at this image for:

PRO-200 best detail settings  |  ET-8550 best detail settings

The number of combinations of resolution and settings has led to a lot of ‘web wisdom’ about optimal printer and driver settings for the best quality. As with much such ‘wisdom’ Keith has often wondered if it could be outdated and based on best practice from 15 or more years ago.

This article looks at some experiments carried out with a Canon PRO-300 printer and using Canon’s Pro Luster paper.

There is a video (~13mins)
supplementing this article

PRO-300 Driver settings and print detail – a balancing act

This is very much a qualitative experiment and evaluation. It’s not about providing detailed optimal settings or the ‘best’ settings. If you disagree with what I suggest, then fine, please go and do some experiments with your own printer – I’m really happy to discuss practical tests, less so theoretical opinions on what one ‘ought’ to do… ;-)

This is about making prints that look good…Ones you are happy with

What am I looking at?

I’m curious about two aspects of printmaking in particular.  One is how high in the printer driver ‘quality’ settings do you need to go, and secondly, does sending more image resolution to the printer driver make for more detailed prints.

I’m testing this using the Canon PRO-300 printer. This 13″ pigment ink printer is one I know well. I have a lengthy review which has lots more info about the printer in articles and videos.

• PRO-300 review

The PRO-300 manuals are all available from Canon

A photograph

I’m using a photo I took up in the Yorkshire Dales with my 50MP Canon 5Ds.  The actual image is one I’ve comfortably printed at A2 size, so I know it has fine detail and represents aspects of what I’ll typically print.

The image has had a little sharpening applied, but that doesn’t really matter here, since I’m interested in how the printer driver translates pixels in the image into dots of ink on the page.

It turns out that if I take the image above and reduce it to about 6.6″ x 4.8″ the file resolution become 1200 pixels per inch. What’s so special about this number for driver settings and print detail?

Dot or pixels?  I cover this in more detail in the P700/900 settings article

Actual printing

Several features of modern printers contribute to the improvement in printer performance over the years.

• The number of inks has increased in many printers – a wider range of ink colours makes it easier to get the ink dots for a pixel to better represent its colour.
• The size of ink drops has decreased allowing more to be fitted close together (overlapping or not)
• Ink droplets may be produced at different sizes
• The software/firmware involved in converting pixels to ink drop positions has become much faster and more powerful, allowing more and more complex calculations to be carried out in the limited time available at normal print speeds.

In Canon printheads (for smaller printers) this produces a basic pattern at 300 per inch. In reality, the control of fine movement of the head and of the paper advance can give finer movements than this, but when you look at printer driver settings with resolution numbers in them, they often come in multiples of 300. So 600,1200, 2400, 4800 etc.

If I take an image at 300ppi then ink droplet calculations are a bit less complex than if the source image was at 314ppi

It’s this limitation on complexity that helped push the idea that having your source image at a particular resolution produced better results when it came to reproducing detail in prints.

Making the prints

The image was resized in Photoshop to 1200, 600, 460 and 300ppi versions. These are the same size, but just with less resolution.

This shot gives a good feel for the relative number of pixels in each print version (click to see much larger)

The 460ppi version is to give a feel as to whether changes from 300 to 600 are gradual or more of a step. If the differences suggest a more stepped response I might do some more versions, but that depends on what’s visible and how much difference I can actually see.  If sending more than 300ppi doesn’t make a difference then the prints from the different images will look similar – if that extra detail shows, then it does make a difference.

The files were printed directly at one of the 2 basic quality settings in the (Mac) driver – the names may differ in the windows version, but the variations should all be there.

Here are the 2 PRO-300 driver settings, just ‘standard’ and ‘highest’.

‘Custom’ makes only minor changes to setting.

Looking at the prints

The small images fit two to a sheet of A4 Pro Luster. That gives me 8 pictures on 4 sheets.

I’m photographing parts of the prints at ~1:1 with my 50MP 5Ds and the Canon MP-E65 macro lens I use for much of my commercial macro work (mostly electronic components).

Here’s the part of the original full resolution image at 100%

The actual ppi for this image depends on your monitor and just how you are viewing this article.

As ever, put this small bit of the whole image in context before you think it looks a bit lacking in detail…

Looking at the dots – PRO-300 driver settings and print detail

This section is just lots of images from the photos. The images can be double clicked and opened in a new window to see in more detail – just remember how small the areas you are seeing are on the actual prints.

BTW – try squinting a bit to blur the dots? It can help reveal more image detail.

Image at 300 ppi

Fron ‘standard’ to ‘highest’

Standard

Highest

Not much difference between the settings with a 300ppi source,

Image at 600 ppi

Now with the same source image but at 600ppi of source resolution.

Note how the vertical post in front of the dry-stone wall is now showing up.

Standard

Highest

There seems to be more detail in the print, and the highest quality version looks less ‘grainy’ from a visual inspection of the print as well.

The differences are small here, and I had to go back to looking at the actual prints and make sure I wasn’t just seeing the differences in my photographing the prints.

Time for a look at quality vs resolution

Highest quality at different resolutions

Four shots at resolutions from 300 to 1200 ppi at the highest setting

300ppi

460ppi

600ppi

1200 ppi

Is there is any benefit above 600?

I think it might actually look slightly worse in terms of detail – there’s no significant difference that I can see though.

However there is a clear difference from 300->460->600 which suggests that if you have a big high resolution image, then sending it at higher than 300ppi can give a better looking image.

Have I learned much about PRO-300 driver settings and detail?

OK, what practical use will I make of these tests? They show nowhere the clear changes I saw with the various settings when I did this test on the P700

It reminded me that the Canon driver for the PRO-300 has relatively few adjustments – to get more print quality settings you need to move up to the 17″ PRO-1000.

For photo papers I can just about see a little coarseness in the prints at the standard setting. Some sky areas can look quite grainy up close (remind me again why you are looking at them so closely? ;-)  )

Giving this some context, I need to have my strongest reading glasses on to see this and I’m looking at the prints from close-up. Not so bad for 5″ x 7″ prints, but for myself, pretty unlikely for prints at A3+ size (13″ x 19″).

For lustre/gloss papers I think I’ll be using the ‘highest’ setting on the PRO-300 – there is not a lot in it though

In terms of image resolution I’d use as high a resolution as I had available, up to ~600ppi

Above that I would likely resample down to 600.

My feeling is that the widespread suggestion that you resize your images to 300ppi is simply no longer valid

So, the biggest difference came from sending more detail to the printer, not the quality setting. One question that comes to mind is what use to make of ‘AI’ type resizing software, such as Topaz Gigapixel AI (see my Topaz reviews and articles covering its use). I’ll come back to this next time I have a larger printer here to test.

Some context – what matters?

OK, so for my own work, printed on a PRO-300 I’m just going to use the highest setting – the overall output seems smoother.

However, there is much more about making a good print than poring over detail so fine that no-one is ever going to see it ;-)

Actual editing of the images, applying aspects of sharpening and looking at local contrast have much larger impacts on overall print quality.

Other paper types

The PRO-300 driver settings only have a single ‘highest’ settings for matt art papers, which makes things easy – just send as much resolution as you’ve got, up to 600ppi

If you’re still unsure as to how this affects your images, the key is to ty it yourself and learn trust your own judgment.

More testing

I will return to this topic for other makes/models of printer in future, but it’s helped me refine aspects of my printmaking workflow, especially since I tend to work with very high resolution images.

In particular I’m curious about what to do with lower resolution source images. Modern re-sizing software and print sharpening potentially challenge many more aspects of image editing/printing ‘perceived wisdom’.

What about lower than 300 ppi?

I’ve looked at printing lower resolution images in the past [Resizing/sharpening old images], but never at how this interacted with what seem to be improved printer drivers. Definitely something to explore further…