Digital BW, The Print

Heh, of course a really good photo-offset print will almost _never_ be black-only, because lithographers understand the inherent problems with halftoning - generally those sorts of prints are at minimum duotones, and more often have even more shades of grey in the mix.

Your other post was really interesting, and makes a lot of sense to me - it also correlates well with the tests I ran here, where the basic quality of the print was pretty good but the tonal range seemed really lacking. And I think you're right about this being why it's so common to see high-contrast and low-contrast, but not much "normal" contrast - the tonal range isn't deep enough to show the full range of tones, so shots with strong blacks and strong whites look high-contrast, and shots with lots of subtle greytones look kinda muddy. (To my eye, in my experience, at least)

> I agree.  I can only see them closer than 18 inches.   But
> lots of photographers and other do examine prints closely.
> Let me use an analogy.  I collect original stone plate 
> lithographs from the late 19th and early 20th century.  From
> a distance I can't tell the different between these originals
> and well-done photo-offset prints and since MOST of the
> time I only admire my lithographs from across the room I
> could have saved thousands of dollars by buying reproductions.
> But SOMETIMES I like to look closely.