Digital BW, The Print

Hi Mark, 
Sorry to hear you are having these problems with the HP 7660. I went 
back to have a look at prints I made from this printer and yes I am 
getting the cross hatch dither banding, but its only visible under a 
4x loupe. It is virtually impossible to see with the naked eye and 
certainly invisible under glass. All my prints came from images shot 
on a Canon 10D. 

Having read that your problems were with scanned images I went to my 
filing cabinet and pulled out some older shots that I had previously 
scanned on a Nikon 4000. I included shots with sky areas that have a 
fair bit of visible grain. These prints were no different to the 
digital source prints, they exhibited the same minute banding visible 
only under a loupe. 

I have noticed that different papers show it more or less clearly 
than others. If the paper has a slight texture to it (Ilford Pearl) 
it becomes part of the texture. On the HP paper it looks very uniform 
but still could be mistaken for paper texture. 

For me the banding falls into acceptable limits. However I was just 
thinking that I am on the original grey cartridge I installed when I 
got the printer. It's almost empty. Got alot of prints out of it. I 
will have to check again when I install a new one. If I do see the 
problems you are having I will post details here.

Paul.

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Mark Hahn" 
<markhahn2000@y...> wrote:
> These problems did not take a loupe to see.  They were very visible 
> to everyone I showed them to.  I also got samples from a couple 
> people and I do not see anything like this in any of their prints.  
> As I said, the first digital source prints looked great, it was 
just 
> the film scan prints, but I certainly can't take those to my 
gallery 
> now can I?  Maybe the driver just can't handle grain, I don't 
know.  
> Someone offered to print my image on their 7660 to see if they get 
> the same results... I'll wait and see before buying a new printer.  
> These are supposed to be higher resolution printers than my 1160 so 
> there shouldn't be visible banding (right?), at least I wouldn't 
> expect so, but my best 1160 prints can hang under gallery lighting 
> and not be spotted as inkjet.  I was expecting the same from this 
> printer... only without the hassles.
> 
> mark
> 
> ...
> > >here is a link to a page showing the specific problems I had 
with 
> my 
> > >7660:
> > > 
> > >http://www.geocities.com/markhahn2000/7660test.html
> > 
> > I have several 7660 samples that someone sent to me, both cart
> > combinations on several papers, and the cross-hatch dither banding
> > appears in all of them, to varying degrees.  It requires a loupe 
to
> > see it.
> ...