Digital BW, The Print

Hi Nick,

sorry to hear about your frustrating experience with PowerRIP. I know it
has a more coarse dithering pattern, but personally I found that much
less objectionable than the metamerism. I think the prints are good
enough that I still have a large amount of prints I made with PowerRIP
in my portfolio. But, your taste may differ of course. One of the
reasons I recommend it in the first place is that it's the only RIP that
actually has a free demo you can try, so at least you get to decide for
yourself based on your own printouts whether it's something you would
want to use or not.

After the introduction of Epson StylusRIP, that might be the more
attractive option. At $200 it's cheaper, and it's reported to have the
same dithering as the Epson driver. It's supposed to be very difficult
to use, but I think by now you should be able to get help from someone
here on which settings to use.

I have a print from ImagePrint that I aquired in an exchange, and the
dithering pattern seems to be about the same as with the Epson driver.
The tone is nice and even over the whole curve, and of course, no
metamerism.

I agree that it's crazy that you should have to pay money to get neutral
prints in the first place, especially when Epson apparently knows how to
fix this themselves in their StylusRIP. They should have released a new
driver to fix this, but I don't think they ever will...

Other than that the only options left to you are OPM, which requires a
mac, and Gimp-Print which requires a mac or linux. Optionally you can
try QuadToneRIP with Gimp-Print. I haven't been able to make it work
yet, but I'm very interested, because the full control over curves for
each color ink channel seem attractive for profiling my Ultratones. I
also see it has some curves for making neutral prints with the 2200, and
you could further modify those curves to your liking.

For me, I don't think I'm ever going back from the refill route... The
quality is superiour and I've been spoiled with low ink prices now. It
would feel painful to pay $20 for a single cartridge ever again (yes,
norwegian prices are _very_ high). It's not something I would reccommend
if you don't want to do a fair amount of experimentation though... I
have to develop my own curves and in some cases mix my own inks to get
the results I want.

If you wait a while longer you might get more options. Piezography will
probably be available for the 2200 sometime this year, IJC/OPM will
probably be ported to windows at some point, and the PixelPixasso RIP
should be available soon. Also I wouldn't be surprised if MIS developed
some sort of BW inkset for the 2200 when they start to sell virgin
empties for it.

In any case I would reccommend you to join one of the print exchanges
here. Not only is it a good way to aquire some very beautiful prints
from many of the creative people her, but it's also very interesting to
see the results from many of the different printing methods. You could
also request a private exhange with someone if you want to see what a
specific process looks like.

--
Daniel Staver
http://daniel.staver.no 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nick Scott [mailto:nickscottphoto@...] 
> Sent: 1. juni 2003 10:13
> To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: RE: [Digital BW] best course of action to print 
> black&white on Epsons 2200
> 
> 
> A question for Daniel...
> 
> I have finally been able to try PowerRip and have to
> say it has been a very frustrating experience.
> Frustrating because the tone of the print was very,
> very nice with no, or negligible, metamerism. BUT the
> dither pattern was totally unacceptable. I tried the
> two options for dithering in the driver and 2880 as
> well. In all cases it was a very noticeable pattern.
> Do you know if Imageprint has a dither pattern at
> least as good as the Epson driver? I am trying to get
> a demo of the app but so far my requests to the uk rep
> have been fruitless. I have seen from your other posts
> that the Ultratones are producing very good results
> but I don't feel like going through the refill route,
> although there may not be an alternative.
> 
> It seems crazy to buy a RIP just for B&W printing,
> given the cost, when 90% of the functionality is not
> required. I'm sure that if ImagePrint were to make a
> driver available with all the other functions ripped
> out - and at a reasonable price - they'd sell loads of
> them. I also think that it's a poor show from Epson
> that they don't include this function in their own
> driver given that the printer is capable of it.
> 
> So far, without special inks or drivers, the best B&W
> I've produced are on PermJet Museum Classic with a
> slight tone adjustment. For some reason metamerism
> seems less with this paper than with others. But what
> I'd like is the neutrality of of the PowerRip with the
> dither of the Epson.
> 
> Nick
> 
> =====
> 
> 
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