Digital BW, The Print

On Monday, October 13, 2003, at 05:57  PM, Steve Kale wrote:

> Very tough call on the B&W to my eye.  Again it is a bit frustrating 
> as the watermark
> for B&W has, again to my eye, a slight purple tint to it and it is so 
> dominant across a
> page.  In the couple of prints I have done thus far, IP prints seem 
> more saturated in
> the darkest parts of the image (without a noticeable loss of detail 
> across the image...)
> and so the QTR versions appear a little "washed out" by comparison.  I 
> would be really
> interested in what others (Carl?) think as my testing here is by no 
> means scientific.
> For completeness, I have been printing to Hahnemuhle Photorag using the
> ep2200mkb_grayPhRag308_2880 profile in IP and comparing it with QTR at
> 1440x720HQ.  (I am a bit worried that printing at 2880dpi is 
> saturating the page too
> much...?)

Steve,

I exchanged test prints with Tom Fors when I was testing the UT inks 
with QTR and he sent me some IP 5.6 prints on EEM (UC inks).  To my 
eye, the tone of the neutral IP print was matched best with a 30 
warm/70 cool blend of the warm/cool QTR UC profiles for EEM.  The QTR 
prints had slightly more deep shadow detail in the 95-100 % region, but 
otherwise the IP and QTR prints looked very similar when the tones were 
matched.  I don't think you can stray too far from  neutral with the IP 
tint picker, so if you need decidedly warm or cool tones (or even 
sepia) then this might be difficult with IP.

Carl