Digital BW, The Print

When dealing with the classic print quality question I like to remember that there are so many variables involved that there is no one part that is a deal-breaker. I've seen absolutely stunning prints from OEM inks. The trick with OEM is to control the inks they way you want to and not through their defaults if that does not work for you.

Why I've run more than 3 K inks over the last several years.  

1. A decrease in color shifts and metamerism. (And yes, even 9900 oem prints shift under different light more than quad K whatever Epson wants to brag about their deltas)
2. Faithful grain reproduction. (when printing a 16x20 from a 35mm you can actually see film grain just like a silver print. Epson ABW doesn't always get their with 400-3200 speed films.)
3. Tonal reproduction. (This one is always tricky. And I would say with the newest x900 printers and OEM ink, tonal reproduction is better than Quads. With 4x5 and smaller films printed 30x40 or larger, tonal reproduction is equiv to K7. However, sometimes you're looking for a very specific tonal feel. And sometimes quad or k3 is the way to go. It's like how all the sound techs are coveting the 16bit audio converters from the first ADAT machines even though we are at 24 and 32 bits now.)
4. Lastly is sharpness. Sharpness is a real hum-dinger because with over-inking it goes all to crap. And certain papers are less sharp with any inkset than say Portfolio rag with 4800 OEM. I've noticed that some printers don't perform very well with K7 and epson dithers no matter the limiting. The sharpest dot and detail I've ever seen personally has come from a 9600 through Studioprint using a Smooth Diffusion dither, K7 ink, and Portfolio Rag paper. They were drum-scans from 8x10 portraits taken close-up. Held against the 8x10 contact prints I could not see a difference in detail until I held a loupe to the prints. Tested on OEM 4800 with the same paper (to see a split hue) I could see a difference in detail clearly.

But in the end, it's up to the artist and the viewer and printer/ink/paper be damned! My fellow Columbia College student Curtis Mann bleaches cprints and it works! I have a student in our art department at UVM who is experimenting with chemical toning of inkjet prints. I want to start experimenting with 1 white channel and 3 K channels printing onto 18% gray!  The material and technical possibilities are endless in the digital world. Let us not forget that a drum-scan is still worlds beyond what a contact print can reproduce so our future resolution (in the 1-1 perspective)  will someday surpass that of silver.

Walker

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