This is an experimental procedure. 

1. Prerequisite test Checking the printer/process repeatability.

Before you create a G7 Curve adjustment or an ICC Profile to influence how a printer is printing, we need to know that the printer and the measurement process is stable and consistent, if not, a lot of time will be wasted trying to build a correction for the printer that will not work. No printing process is perfect, but some printers are more consistent than others. Understanding the variation of any printer is critical to being able to control that printer to provide a salable result. Once we understand the variation dynamics of a printer using the E-Factor metric we can decide if this level of repeatability is good enough to attempt to create a G7 Curve or an ICC profiling, which can be time consuming.

For this purpose, we recommend printing the Minimal G7 control strip which has to be printed 10+ times but not as a single job but with at least a couple of hours delay between printouts. This is the process of understanding the repeatability of the printer to ensure the process is stable and consistent.  

Minimal G7 control strip contains 21 patches and provides basic print data for qualification. In this test, we have to measure each control strip as a separate file and then create a group to analyze the variation using Print Inspector.

At the bottom of this page, there is a large patch version of Minimal G7 control strip, where the patch size is 20 x 20 mm and the control strip is repeated three times on an 11x17" page to enable intra-page variation evaluations.

2. Profile creation 

To be sure that the printer is still in a predictable state - this step starts from Minimal G7 control strip which should be compared to the baseline condition of this printer created in step 1 (use group of measurements as a baseline).

We have prepared 2 versions of the chart for evaluation. We ask you to print and measure all. 

• CC-200 CMYK
• CC-1617 

All PDFs are attached at the bottom of the page. It is allowed to reduce scale (fit to page option) 

Use an 11 mm aperture (when measuring with the CC Sphere) and keep patches as big as possible to be sure that no neighbor patches have an impact on measurements.