Digital BW, The Print

> Our opinions on digital vs. silver obviously differ fundamentally.
>
> <snip>

> But if I ever get the opportunity to exhibit my pictures, I will be back in
> the darkroom making 11x14 selenium-toned fiber-base gelatine silver prints,
> because they are the only medium which appropriately conveys what I have on
> my negatives. This is an aesthetic judgment I am making about my own
> pictures; your point of view is obviously different. You may also be
> judging digital output on the basis of large-format negatives, great big
> printers, and a procedure that is beyond my reach in terms of both money
> and complexity.
> <snip>

Dear Nick,
While I certainly don't know what the problem is that does not allow you to perfectly represent your images
digitally, I still think that there is a problem in your system *somewhere*.  I do not believe that one cannot
get a facsimile of your photo prints on an inkjet output.

I'm also not saying that your problems are imagined.  I feel sorry for you, having been there ourselves.  I
guess that I want to stress that I hope you don't throw the baby out with the bath water on this.  There is
absolutely no reason why you should not be able to get what you are asking for in your output.  It is not an
inherent flaw in inkjet technology, but a localized one in your system.

We had a problem for 10 months, in which we could not *consistently* get a good print in Photoshop on our
2000P.  The problem was that when printing via Photoshop, we could not achieve a good black most times (but
not always) in our color output.  When we did a work around via Quark, it printed very well...But it was time
consuming and stupid (it also took us 8 month to figure this out....can you imagine the time and materials we
wasted?!!). Our trouble shooting included having Epson replace our 2000P.   It was *very* frustrating.  People
kept on telling us that we were doing something wrong, and we weren't. Both Adobe and Epson blamed each other,
and we were caught in the middle.  Finally someone (from the colorsync list at Abobe) privately e-mailed us,
and explained how it had to be Epson's problem.  Our problem ended up being a conflict between Photoshop and
the Epson 'space' softwares.  And the 'fix' was to simply set the 'space' in the printer's dialogue box to the
*incorrect* setting, and the problem vanished.

It was frustrating, stupid, and not logical.  Nobody can explain why this worked, but it did.  We had to be
very insistent with Epson, and went through 3 levels of tech people before one of them (after a lot checking
of our settings, reinstalling lots of 'stuff', etc.) came up with the solution.

So, hang in there.  Perhaps you can try to have someone else output one of your files to see if the problem
lies within your printer?  We have a 2000P, and use Epson's ink, but if you would like to e-mail me one of
your files , I would be happy to try outputting it on our machine.  On the other hand, there should be someone
on this list who has a similar setup, who might also volunteer.

Let me know, OK?

Harvey Ferdschneider
partner, SKID Photography, NYC


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