Digital BW, The Print

Mike,
The digital neg is what got me here in the first place. I have not tried using my epson to produce a dig neg, but did produce image setter negatives that I contact printed on both silver and palladium-platinum as ziatypes. Some of the images were stunning, the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, I abandoned the effort because I found it extremely difficult to find service bureaus willing and able to do what I needed. Another occassional problem was related to the necessity of using a transfer function which tended to compress some areas of the gray scale. Realistically, you are probably dropping the number of distinct shades of gray to well less than 100. This works for some images, but in others you will see a little posterizing. This is why Dan Burkholder would often use two negatives for exposure, one to separate the shadows, and one to separate the highlights. Printing your own desktop negs will similarly affect the gray scale. In essence, you are going from a fairly linear gray scale to a more logarithmic one, consistent with the response of photographic vs printing materials.  I will be interested to hear how it goes.
You might consider dye based inks on pictoro translucent media. You might also be able to acheive some of the effect of the transfer function by varying the color along your gray scale, with red obvious being most dense as viewed by the sensitized photo materials, blue being more transparent. If I had enough time in this life...............................
Stephen


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]