Digital BW, The Print

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Nelson [mailto:peter@...]
> Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2003 5:33 PM
> To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [Digital BW] Re: Myth: was Any New 2200 BW for PC's?
>
>
> --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Clayton Jones"
> <cj@c...> wrote:
> > Hello Peter,
> >
> > >2. Use black-ink-only. No metamerism but very dotty and contrasty.
> >
> > Since you continue to perpetuate the myth that BO printing is
> > contrasty, I will continue to debunk it:  BO printing is not any
> more
> > contrasty than any other BW printing technique.  It has the ability
> to
> > accurately render any degree of contrast the image posesses, with
> > excellent shadow detail and subtle tonal gradation.
>
>
> Just do the math.  At 2880x1440 DPI (the maximum for the 2200), the
> printer can produce 4147200 dots/in^2.   If you are rendering an
> image at 300 PPI each pixel in the original image gets only enough
> real estate on the paper for 46 printer dots.   Since each dot of
> black ink can only be black or ~black, that's not NEARLY enough to
> represent a full tonal range!
>
Peter,

Contrast is the slope of the tonal curve not the number of tones, so there
is no particular reason that BO printing should be more or less contrasty
than any other method. Since BO printing has the same Dmin and Dmax over any
image range the contrast should not be compressed by using this method.

Your numbers would only have meaning if the ink was laid down without a
dither pattern.

I have several of Nick Hartmann's and Clayton Jones's prints and they do not
suffer from being too contrasty. They both have put in a lot of time working
with this method and it shows. It isn't so much what you use as how you use
it.

I can understand that you might personally not like this technique but I
can't see why you feel compelled to attack it so harshly. It certainly is
easy for people to try and they have little to lose. If they don't like it,
they can try something else. All kinds of printing techniques exist in the
wet darkroom. There is plenty of room for many, many approaches on the
digital side as well.

Martin Wesley

>