I've been printing on Entrada Natural 190 on a Canon 8300 with the Moab ICC profile for several years, and have been very happy with this combination.

I've just got a new Epson 3880 and have been making some prints with Entrada Natural 190 and the Moab ICC profile. Something appears to be off. In darker areas of the print the detail gets very muddy, and the paper overall is warping somewhat, implying there is too much ink going down. I read somewhere else on the Moab forum that too much ink can negatively effect dmax, and I think that may be happening here. I'm using the "Ultra Premium Presentation Matte" paper setting as recommended on the Moab ICC profile page.

Also, for comparison, I made a print of one of the same images on Epson Hot Press Natural from a sample pack I have, and the dmax there is waaaaaaay more than what I'm seeing on Entrada, so there's something weird about my setup.

Have you heard of this happening with your Entrada profile on a 3880, and do you have any advice on things I can try to improve my results?

Thanks,
David

You can try using the Cold Press media setting. That works better for me. You should also be using the Matte Black ink.

I'm using matte black (when you specify a matte paper media setting, in my case "Ultra Premium Presentation Matte", the printer automatically switches to matte black).

I thought perhaps this was an ink load issue, so I printed a 16 level greyscale step chart without any color management in PS using the "Ultra Premium Presentation Matte" media setting and no adjustments to the Color Density slider in the driver window (ie, this was set to 0%), and there seems to be sufficient separation between all levels, including between black (0,0,0) and the next highest level, so now I'm not so sure that ink load is the issue.

I'm concerned about using the Cold Press or Hot Press media settings with the 190gsm Entrada since presumably those settings are for thicker papers that can take more ink.

I could get a custom profile made for this printer paper combo, and perhaps that would fix the muddy shadow details. But what now concerns me more is the paper buckling/warping when printing darker images, which definitely sounds like it's laying down too much ink.

Has anyone experienced this with Entrada 190 on Epson 3880? Moab, have you tested Entrada 190 on this printer or other Epson printers, or do you use the 300gsm version when making profiles?

Thanks again.