HP Photosmart driver – no option to use ColorSync under OS X

I had been running Photoshop 7 and printing to an HP 7150 under OS 9.2.2. When I purchased the printer over a year ago, I went through much $ ink and paper trying to get the color right. All colors were noticeably pale using the Photosmart III option in the HP print driver dialog. I finally determined conclusively that if I select the colorsync option, rather than photosmart, in the driver’s popup menu under color, the colors were came out excellent and very close to what I was seeing on screen.

In fact, in the driver dialog color window there’s a sample image (not a preview, but a stock image in the driver), which includes red, green and blue color bars. With colorsmart selected, the blue bar is more of a violet, while with colorsync selected, the blue is dead on and the other colors appear more pure as well. There are sliders for saturation, brightness and tone, but no permutation of these gives me true colors.

When I choose colorsync from the popup, instead of the sliders I can now choose either automatic or photosmart series for printer profile. IIRC, either works fine. The ICC profile photosmart series also goes by the name HP 900 Series DeskJet [I can see this by going to the ColorSync control panel; when I click on HP 900 Series DeskJet there, a help balloon sez "Note: The filename of this profile is ‘photosmart series’"].

So what’s my problem? Life is good and I can print beautiful living color photos under OS 9.2.2, as long as I choose ColorSync, rather than PhotoSmart III, in the driver, right? Yep.

Well, not so fast bucko. With an eye to upgrading soon to Photoshop CS, which *requires* OS X, and, having not been able to get the HP drivers to run previously under OS X, and noticing new HP drivers released in Nov, I proceeded to update from OS 10.2.1 -> 10.2.8 and was successful in installing the new HP driver as well. For the first time ever I was able to print under OS X. Except there is *NO* option to choose ColorSync under the color selections. Where under OS 9 I can choose Colorsmart III, ColorSync, Grayscale or Black & White, under OS X the same dialog only allows ColorSmart III or Grayscale (the lack of B&W option under OS X is documented in the ReadMe; I’ll leave that for someone else’s rant %-). The driver version is hp deskjet 2.3.1, BTW.

I’ve googled the topic to death and searched HP and Apple’s support site, but have come up blank. Any ideas what the story is with this? Obviously, I can just reboot into OS 9 and use Photoshop 7 when I need to print, but that’s not ideal. Maybe some kludge would allow me to print using the driver under Classic 9 environment?

Cheers,
Jayfar
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