I have often found that my Photo EX gave some subtle microbanding  (ie light bands of approximately 0.1mm apart and not uniformly present throughout the print) which was more pronounced in the Supermicroweave mode. In the "NO Supermicroweave mode", this microbanding was almost none-existent. I was therefore anxious to try the new drivers to see if Epson had addressed this glitch in the Photo EX which prevents it from giving even better results than what I already consider superb output.

1 Version 4.5 with Supermicroweave On

There does not appear to be any significant increase in image quality over its predecessor driver. The “subtle microbanding” sometimes exhibited by my Photo EX is still there  The microbanding and the pizza tracks are what I consider the only two key problem spots with the print quality from the Photo EX. Here's what the option for "supermicroweave" looks like under the new driver:-

The description of “Super(x)” was “full overlaping microweave” which sounded promising. Printouts at this setting however did not have much of an improvement in terms of image quality over the old drivers. Perhaps I need to examine the printouts more closely as superficially, the differences are not immediately obvious. Because of the subtle microbanding (still present under the new driver), I prefer to print without the "Super(x)" option ticked.I do not know whether the subtle microbanding exhibited on my photo EX is exhibited in all Photo EX models (I have seen it on quite a few here in SIngapore). Notwithstanding the subtle microbanding, I still find the EX output very astounding for the most part. 

2PhotoEnhance 3 with Sepia Tone

New to Version 4.5 is what appears to be an update to PhotoEnhance 2 found in the old driver version 4.12 which is called PhotoEnhance 3 under the new driver. There is now an option to print in Sepia tone. Choosing PhotoEnhance 3 with Sepia tone selected produced an image with the claimed sepia tone effect without any manipulation necessary to the image. In other words, I selected a full colour RGB tiff file for printing. This saves time since you don't have load up your favourite image editor to desaturate or change modes.It would be nice though had the new driver included some sliders for adjustments. I found that the sepia tone produced was too heavy for my liking. I use my own set of Photoshop Curves which gives just a hint of sepia which I am still refining in the hope that one day I will stumble onto pure grey (yeah right?!). 

3PhotoEnhance 3 with Sharpen

I also tried the “Sharpen” feature under PhotoEnhance 3 which as you can see from the image below, uses a sharpen filter which is applied by the driver itself. One can see that the sharpen filter has the most noticeable effect on the text so be careful when you choose this option to make sure there is not too much small detail in the image in question which may suffer from the sharpen filter. PhotoEnhance 3 itself basically adds a fair deal of contrast and saturation to the image printed. 

4Printing B&W images

I next proceeded to do a “desaturate” on the test image to get rid of all colour values. Then I printed the image using the same settings as (1) above. The result:- the same greenish tint in light areas and slight magenta cast in some of the darker areas as that produced by the Version 4.12 drivers. Defininately not cool grey here. Looks like printing B&W will be down to the iterative (and costly) process of doing “curves” in Photoshop to balance out the green and magenta cast and trial and error printing. 

Well, that's all for now. Just a few words on this topic really. Not a  complete review by any means as there are some other new functions which I have not had time to go into. I will still stick to my previous preferred settings with the exception of "supermicroweave" which I now do not use. One plus point from not using the "super" setting: you get printouts which come out much faster (almost twice as fast).  Happy printing!