Digital BW, The Print

Carl Schofield was kind enough to send me some step wedges printed on his Epson 2200 on EAM using the Photo Black and the Matte Black inks. I only have the Dmax data for the Photo Black as Carl was able to optimize the driver settings to get a much better tone ramp after he switched to the Matte Black ink.

I have posted Carl's driver settings and my readings of his test wedges in folder:

Files > Ink Sets > Epson 2200

This output looks much better than the 7600 samples I was sent earlier. It is hard to tell from the wedges if there are any color crossovers. It may be crossing to a yellow warm tone in the upper tones but if it does, it does not leap out on the wedges. It is has very nice neutral look in daylight and shifts to a slight magenta or purplish cast under tungsten light, rather a strong selenium toned look. This is reminiscent of daylight balanced 2000P prints under tungsten light but the effect is about 90 to 95% lower. It looks okay under daylight balanced fluorescents and rather green-blue under cheap fluorescents but that is what you would expect.

I am reluctant to judge ink qualities just from wedges where the tones are lined up. Things may show up in actually prints where the tones fall together in much greater combination.

The Dmax of the 2200 Matte Black on EAM is 1.73 and the Photo Black on EAM is 1.46. You would definitely want the Matte Black ink for printing on matte papers. Carl also sent me a MIS-VM wedge from his 1270 for comparison and the VM Dmax was 1.67. The 2200 Dmax is better but not a big improvement. In comparison the Selenium PT with the Piezo driver on EAM is 1.72. With Photo Rag I can get 1.81 with the S-PT. You might get a similar improvement from the 2200.

From the CMY densities the 2200 Matte Black is magenta-red warm in the shadows. The magenta density dominates from 100 to 0%. Y is higher than C starting at 100% and at 80% they become equal and above that point C becomes greater than Y. This is due in part to the fact that EAM has a cool base, C=0.06, M=0.06, Y=-0.01. In any case the upper tones measure very cool even though they do not appear so cool in daylight. The Spectrocam was set at a D50 illuminant a graphic arts standard but different from daylight.

I have e-mailed Paul asking if he will fade test the wedges and hopefully he will agree as I think that many of us would be interested in how the 2200 ink compares to MIS-FS and PT inks.

Martin Wesley

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





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