Digital BW, The Print

With the original Piezo inks I and others have noted that the Epson driver with the same ink produces a deeper black than the Piezo drive. I rechecked this with the new Piezo tone inks. I printed a 1" 100% black square on the same piece of Photo Rag paper. First with the Piezo driver and then with the MIS-VM workflow and a RGB separation curve through the Epson Driver. After letting the printout sit for a couple of days (it does dry down by the way) I got the following measurements checking all four corners and the center of each square:

Piezo driver: 1.80 to 1.82
Epson driver: 1.89 to 1.91

To see if there was still low end separation with Epson driver I printed out a step wedge that includes 95% through 100% patches once again using the MIS-VM workflow. These lower tones gave the following readings:

100% - 1.89 - 190
99% - 1.87 - 1.88
98% - 1.85 - 1.86
97% - 1.80
96% - 1.78
95% - 1.72

This is not perfectly linear but the workflow used is not matched to the inks.

A Dmax of 1.9 is really quite amazing for a matte paper and brings the matte inkjet prints very close to silver print range.

It will be interesting to see if the PiezoTone black ink can be used to replace the standard black in the MIS-VM and MIS-FS sets. The black in the MIS-VM set has a Dmax of 1.7 to give you the comparison.

Martin Wesley
http://www.borderless-photos.de/guests.html





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