Digital BW, The Print

Roy, I'm glad you jumped in here. I haven't givin "dots" much thought 
recently until I read your recent post comparing the QTR RIP 7500 
prints vs. the 7600 and you stated you could see dots with a loupe on 
both prints. I really DO believe the dots are invisible on my 7000 
and 9000 prints, certainly compared to 2200 rip prints and any other 
color to Black and white work flow or vari tint workflow I've seen. I 
have not seen QTR prints but you have already stated you can see dots 
with a loupe. Send me your address off list and I will send you a 
print, I'd like to know if I'm crazy :)Well I probably am, but 
another experienced set of eyes can't hurt.
The Darkroom has given us true contiunous tone, and this as not been 
easy to get with digital and inkjet printing,Thanks to 16bit scanning 
and great software the more difficult to see the dots the closer we 
are to continuos tone.IMHO.
I think its a technical miracle, that my dots from the 7000 appear 
close to non existant(invisible) compared to previously mentioned 
workflows that 
actually produce beautiful prints.
Quadtone BW printing is clearly a different animal than making BW 
prints with a color set up.
Steven Meyers--- 
In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Roy Harrington" 
<roy@h...> wrote:
> 
> Steve,
> 
> The 7500 is a great machine.  I run mine with quad grays and two 
toners,
> using QuadToneRIP and Mac OS X.  I don't think toners have any 
detrimental
> effect on quality and advantage of variable tone is great.
> 
> But I also don't think there's any way to have invisible dots with 
a 8x loupe
>  -- the printer puts out pretty large drops of ink.
> 
> I actually ran a five distinct grays system for a while (I've never 
heard anyone
> else do it).  It makes a different -- it is smoother but it's hard 
to see.
> The newer printers with variable dot size can get the same results 
with
> fewer grays.
> 
> Roy
>