Digital BW, The Print

On 10/8/02 1:42 AM, "Mark Tucker" <mtucker508@...> wrote:

> Ouch! You would go so far as to characterize the black as "very
> poor"? I might not go that far.

1.48 is very poor...at least for my expectations from using quad systems to
print BW over the last 2 years.
 
> But yes, the blacks are "somewhat less than optimum". EAM is
> good, and PhotoRag is good. But they're not the blacks that I
> used to get on my 7000, using ESFA and the MIS 1270 type dyes.
> I'll agree with Robert on that.

EAM is about 1.73
Photorag is about 1.66
Everything else is below 1.5
Many fine art papers show bad mottling with the ultrachromes.
I haven't seen the Epson Somerset Velvet yet.
 
> I am using the standard Epson driver with a custom profile. I
> profiled it this time using PhotoRealistic/gamma 2.2, instead of
> the standard NoColorAdjustment in the Epson driver. The first
> profile I got back was a tad greenish, but I tweaked it with Kodak
> Colorflow, by adding some magenta, and the new profile is pretty
> sweet.
> 
> Robert's got one of my prints, coating it. He claims a very good
> increase in black density after coating it. That certainly got my
> attention.

A museo ultrachrome print that showed a 1.48 dmax before coating reads at
2.22 after coating.  I have seen higher dmax for coated quat prints (2.40),
but there is very little visual difference between 2.20 and 2.40.  There is
an enormous difference between 1.48 and 2.20.  The difference between 1.48
(Museo/Ultrachromes) and 1.75 (Museo/Piezotone) is very dramatic.

Personally I think Epson's greed, once again, will be their problem.  They
have created an inkset that works great with a couple of their papers (Epson
Premium Gloss, Epson Premium Luster, Epson Enhanced Matte), and not well at
all with the vast majority of other papers out there.

While I advocate coating fine art papers to achieve Silver Print like
performance, I don't think you should have to...and I think you should have
paper choices...which it appears that you don't with the Ultrachromes.  I
think a much better solution for creating toned prints is the MIS VM set or
the new Piezotone line. In addition I think we are going to see other
options for toning using a variety of toned quad based systems over the
coming months.  These options will be much cheaper than using Epson inks and
will give better performance over a range of media.  The exception to this,
is if you want to make E-surface RC style prints...I don't think the
Ultrachromes can be beat for that at this point.  Personally, that's not my
market...but I realize for a large percentage of the BW market...that's
exactly what they want.

Robert