Digital BW, The Print

I'd like to add my thanks to the chorus already expressed.  The event at
Bryan's was an extraordinary chance to see the what other list members were
up to both artistically and technically.

On the artistic front, I spent a fair amount of time going through Mark
Tucker's portfolio of exceptional images.  Despite Mark's concern over his
anemic blacks, the quality of images shown through.  His work reflects his
spirit and is infused w/ creativity, humor and goodwill.  George Foster also
showed a beautiful portfolio of work that shared much of the same
sensibility/attitude (Mark and George couldn't decide which was the right
word).  The work was based on 4x5 color negatives and showed wonderful
coherence among a variety of commercial purposes.  Joel Silverman had a
beautiful hand-bound accordion book of low saturation color images that were
beautifully realized and well presented.  I do a lot of simple bound books
myself and I plan to try Joel's binding method on one of my next projects.

On the technical front, I would highlight a couple of points.  First, the
ultrachrome blacks were a bit anemic.  Part of this is certainly the
comparison of dye inks to pigment (pigment is always going to suffer a bit
in comparison) but I think a big part of this is not having the workflow
(paper, profile, RIP) down perfectly (Mark - don't buy back your old 7000
just yet).  Someone whose name I can't recall (it was all a bit of blur)
showed output of the 7600 using the Atkinson profiles and I thought they
were extraordinary relative to Epson canned (poor) and the ImagePrint5 (good
but not quite as good).  The most common weakness in terms of print quality
was lack of separation in deep blacks.  The Epson driver suffers here and
better calibration and/or the use of a RIP would probably fix it.  The first
step to fixing a problem is recognizing you have a problem.  Seeing so many
workflows side by side facilitated that comparison.

Mark Tucker also had example of Robert Morrison's custom coating system and
I thought that looked promising.  The coating raises the dMax of blacks
significantly (unlike sprays) and, while creating a glossy surface, does not
make the picture look plastic.  I will try that myself when it becomes
available.  

Finally, the get together was a pleasant chance for me to thank many
generous posters for their past help.  I talked to John Nollendorf briefly
and related to him how I had all his posts regarding back-flushing the
dampers out on my desk last week when I undertook the process for the first
time.  The forum represents a lot of goodwill that's easy to take for
granted.  My thanks again for Bryan (and Mark) for their help in actualizing
the cyber community - for one afternoon, the virtual was real.  Best wishes.

- Tom Dunn