Digital BW, The Print

Martin Wesley writes:
 > Mike,
 > 
 > I still have the samples you sent and I posted something awhile back but it
 > is worth revisiting at this point.
 > 
 > The samples include two images each printed once on a matte Oce art paper
 > (very rough)and one on a semi-gloss Ilford paper. My impression is the same
 > as yours. These prints do not equal prints done with grayscale inks. There
 > are strange unpleasant tonal splits, blue to yellow. Possibly this could be
 > corrected by better use of the printer.
 > 
 > The fact that the split is there may be an indication of why Epson came up
 > with the gray balancer software for the 2200 and makes me wonder how
 > difficult people will find it to get a good neutral tone. While buying
 > custom profiles is a possible solution, the fact that the inks and papers
 > vary from lot to lot may make this impractical unless you invest in your own
 > profiling software. The unfortunate truth seems to be that neutral B&W
 > printing is much more sensitive to tiny shifts in hue than color printing.
 > [...]

I was fortunate to get to spend some time with Bill Atkinson last
week.  He has a 9600 and is working on developing some custom profiles
for it.  He's found that none of his normal profiling packages seem to
deliver results that give good neutral grayscales, so he's been
hacking his way to something better.  And, the profiles that he
generates will be freely available!

His results look wonderful, though he still has some fine tuning to
do.  I got a kick out of noticing a *slight* green deviation in the
almost white tones and then seeing it confirmed by a set of
spectrophotometer readings.  I'm not usually that astute!

This will probably only be useful to the bigger printer folk (7600 and
9600), and just how useful will depend on how successful Epson is at
delivering on their promised printer-to-printer consistency.  It'll be
worth keeping tuned to though.

g.