Digital BW, The Print

> "No lumps, no bumps?"   That's what I remember my mother saying when
> she taught me how to cook "Cream of Wheat."  :-)
>
> Thanks, Moreno.  It's good to know that Piezo will work if I can't
> get the MIS inks and curves right.  Hopefully retrofitting the 1290
> driver will work, though.  I use Picture Window Pro, not Photoshop,
> so Piezo would mean an extra stop loading a copy of PS LE or Elements
> to print.  I'm curious, did you ever compare Piezo with the Epson
> driver methods, or did you choose Piezo initially?

No, I ended up with Piezo after a few trials and tribulations. I first
started out with an 1160, original MIS quads, and the Brandin curves. After
a bit of a learning curve and some experimentation, I was getting very good
print quality. The prints sparkled and had a crispness and depth that I
still have problems matching with Piezo. The inks were a bit too warm for my
tastes, not all that stable, and the 1160 had microbanding issues that
required a lot of effort to resolve.

About this time, Paul Roark was in the process of developing his VM curves.
The concept of variable tone from one printer was too much to resist. The
1160 was gone, and I bought some VM inks for my new 1280. I played around
with this setup for months with little success. I never could get rid of
various levels of posterization. Tyler Boley's warm curves for the 1280
weren't too bad, but still not up to what I was getting with the
1160/Brandin curves. I also didn't care too much for the colder VM tones,
and realized that I'd be perfectly happy with slightly warm single-tone
output.

I was running W2K at the time, and the Epson W2K 1280 driver had some
serious spooling errors, which made printing large files a hit and miss
operation. Too much tinkering time, not enough results. I did consider the
Piezo driver, but for the 1280, Cone only sold the complete package (driver,
inks, and CIS) for around $900, IIRC. I already had a CIS, and the problem
reports with Cone inks made me a bit gun-shy.

Earlier this year, the Piezo driver and inks were unbundled. Inkjetgoodies
sold me the Cone Piezo driver AND a set of MIS FS inks for around $200. That
was the best money I've ever spent for digital printing. I get a
surprisingly good screen-to-print match, the Piezo output is very smooth
(maybe even too smooth), there's no conversion to RGB, and no fiddling with
curves. It's easy and predictable.