Digital BW, The Print

On 09/04/2012 11:19 PM, Paul Roark wrote:

> To be honest, the recent report of yellowed edges on Museo Silver rag just
> about was the last straw for my exploration of the glossy pigments. For my
> uses -- cards and other casual prints -- the 1400 with dyes wins the beauty
> contest, and "carbon on cotton" has no serious competition for fine art
> wall display.

Paul,

There are several good reasons to drop glossy pigment inks like 
bronzing, gloss difference, etc but the yellow edges of Museo Silver Rag 
should not be among them I think.



On mixing HP PK, I have a simple ink set in an HP K5400 4 channel 
printer. MK in black position, PK in Cyan, 1/3 PK in Magenta, 1/9 PK in 
Yellow. The gloss  settings in the HP driver only uses CMY channels, the 
matte settings adds the Black channel. Photoshop curves embedded in 
profiles, printing from Qimage. Ink medium is an OCP alternative gloss 
enhancer for Kodak thermal head printers. PK and MK from expired but 
full Z6100 carts. Print quality is worse than my Z3100 delivers, the 6 
and 9 picoliter droplet size and office printer weaving show. But there 
is less bronzing than the Z3100 or Z3200 delivers, even when their GE is 
used. This printer/ink set combination was from the beginning a trial 
whether quad ink mixing could be done for thermal head printers too and 
it is working without flaws.

On a neutral/cool RC paper HP Premium ID Gloss (Lab 95.2  -1.0  -1.8 in 
SpectrumViz) A typical linearised print made with the inkset above gives a:
Step 000 Lab 95.84 -0.86 -1.62
Step 050 Lab 52.45  0.11 -1.39
Step 100 Lab 05.78  0.37 -2.53

The most extreme a values are at paper white -0.86 and near black 0.83.
The most extreme b values are at step 60 -1.17 and at black -2.53
Big droplets of course which means that the values will change for 
smaller droplet size printers. I can not tweak the color tone range with 
such a limited ink set.



-- 
Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst

Dinkla Grafische Techniek
Quad, pi\ufffdzografie, gicl\ufffde
www.pigment-print.com