Digital BW, The Print

Hey thanks Paul for the mention. 

One of the best selling Piezography systems of all time is Piezography Special Edition for the Epson 1400. We still sell 40 or 50 SPED systems a month for this printer. Not as many as in the first 2 years of its release. But, it's a very tenacious platform - probably because it's relatively inexpensive and it's 13" wide.

Recently my Carbon Sepia K6 has taken off on it. Probably thanks to Paul, because a lot of new users want to start off on carbon and Paul talks a lot about pure carbon. Carbon Sepia K6 has been around since 2005, but suddenly this year it took off.

Pigment is not a problem with the 1400 printer. The print heads are very similar to the Epson pigment printers. Piezography pigment is encapsulated like Epson Ultrachrome pigment - just with a different exterior material. So Piezography pigment inks present no clogs and no issues even though it has a tiny jet orifice size. 

The 1400's tiny drop size makes six dilutions of ink look as good as seven dilutions on the more expensive x800 and x880 printers. You are not really giving up much with the 1400 in comparison to Piezography on a 3880 for example.

If anyone interested, 1400 systems here:
http://shopping.netsuite.com/s.nl/c.362672/sc.15/category.6522/.f

Because all of the k6 ink sets can be intermixed, a lot of 1400 customers are buying extra cartridge sets and additional bottles of ink to formulate their own tone. As long as you only mix similar shades together you can experiment as much as you want. In other words you can mix any shade 3 with any other shade 3 in any proportion and still use my K6 curves in QuadTone RIP. You would not want to mix some shade 2 and a little shade 4 together - because then the QTR curves would not work. But if you want to temper the warmth of carbon a bit with Selenium into the darker shades - mix to your heart's content - just keeping the similar shade rule between the different ink tones.

Quite a few of my most experimental large format customers buy the 1400 and use it as a test printer to see what ink mixing looks like before they commit their large format printer to a custom blend.

Really the only thing we do not support on this printer is glossy printing. For Piezography Glossy you need a printer with more ink positions. But, for fine art matte papers - this printer is hard to beat. We often do the Special Edition production at Cone Editions on 1400s when the customer only needs small prints. You can't visually tell the difference between it and the Special Edition K7 running on a 7880. The 1400 is probably the Piezography ink bargain printer of all time.


Jon Cone
Piezography

 
 




--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Paul" <roark.paul@...> wrote:
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> "HarryB" <hrblaine@> wrote:
> 
> 
> > --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Paul" <roark.paul@> wrote:
> > >
> > > 
> > > First, don't be afraid  of pigments in a 1400. ... 
>  
> > So, EB6 or UT 14?  Those are the choices, right?  
> 
> Those are the MIS choices.  Jon Cone also has some inksets for  the 1400, I believe.  And, of  course, the field is wide open to those  who do their own.  
> 
> I currently have 4 Eboni-based inks for matte fine art and 2 Noritsu based inks for glossy printing -- brochures and cards.  With QTR more than a single B&W inkset can be used, and the 1400 is good enough to do very well with less than a full hextone.  On the other hand, while the single black only was fine for the small images on my current brochure, I did not find it good enough for larger prints or images with smooth skies.  The addition of the single lighter, dilute Noritsu K + M does bring the quality up to what I need for those purposes.
> 
> Paul
> www.PaulRoark.com
>