Digital BW, The Print

So Clayton sent me a few of his black-only prints and asked me to post my thoughts about them.

So, here goes: 

They are really nice! Definitely better than I've ever been able to get with just black ink. And better for that matter than any black-only prints I've seen to date.

If I were to nitpick, I would say the same basic things that I said about the test prints I did myself - they do have some of the same highlight/shadow issues that I've been describing as contrast problems - the highlights are _way_ white, the shadows _way_ black, midtones are good but a little flat. Some of the images he sent are _really_ high-contrast, but there are one or two with a more "normal" contrast range - the only thing that seems to be a consistent problem is maintaining highlight detail - shadow detail is quite good, though there isn't a real transition from "almost black" to "really black." The dots are definitely visible, but they don't bother me in these images. (And I can't tell which are from the printing process and which are film grain at this size print.) 

Basically, I still prefer good hextones to these prints, but they've shown me that it's possible to make really good prints with this technique :)