Digital BW, The Print

Paul, thanks a million for your replies. I had in fact used the warm tone
(.03) curve on the Satine but the problem is much more than tones ‹ the
prints are really bad (whereas the PR and EEM are very nice, so I guess it¹s
the economy...er, paper). Truthfully, though, it¹s not a disaster since I
get great stuff on the 2200/OPM combo, and I can always use up the Satine
there and move on to something new on the 1280. I¹m encouraged by your
tryout of the Moab paper and am also greatly interested in Epson¹s
PremierArt paper.

I have a new issue, though, and a wholly unexpected one: the prints from my
2200 are visibly sharper than those from the 1280. Since it was an apples to
oranges thing, I¹d never really compared them before. I lined up the tones
so that could be divorced from the equation, and then printed the same image
on PR and EEM on both printers (OEM in the 2200, UT in the 1280). I didn¹t
use the Satine because of the problem with the UT inks. My wife thought I
was nuts, but a client came by and I showed him the two prints ‹ and within
a minute he zeroed in on the area of critical focus in the image and said
³Look at the rock here ‹ the cracks along the front ‹ this one (the 2200
print) is a lot sharper.² In the meantime I had run a cleaning cycle,
confirmed the test pattern, and very critically run the head alignment
utility (using a loupe to pick the best choices all along). I¹ve now made
three or four prints, on PR and EEM, and the 2200 is a little sharper, a
little more detailed, in each case. In a vacuum, you¹d never see anything
wrong with the 1280 prints. But there is a clear difference when compared
side by side with the 2200. I found this quite surprising since I¹d always
assumed the actual image quality from the two would be more or less
identical.

Matthew Born 


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