Digital BW, The Print

Hi Steve,

Thanks to you and also to Paul and Tyler for your helpful replies. Re 
your comment about not getting hung up on dots, I hear that, and I'm 
only really trying to be thorough in this research phase that I'm in. 
I'm worried about how prints look to the naked eye, and I'm not 
concerned about what people might see if they start examining my 
prints with a loupe.

Tyler, thanks for that nice summary of the range of options. There 
are some software packages there that I hadn't heard of before, so 
I'll read up on those a little bit. I can see that's an important 
distinction you make between systems that rely upon RGB or CMYK 
curves in PS (where effectively you're working with narrow-gamut 
colour images) and those which use a monochrome image and do all the 
work in the driver. The former gives the advantage that you can 
create split-tone images where the tone is linked to things other 
than the grey level, which opens up some creative possibilities. The 
second approach theoretically allows fine tuning of the way the ink 
patterns are applied, specifically to give better B&W quality. It 
seems from your and Paul's comments that the Epson driver is still a 
pretty good choice though.

Paul, your observations about hiding the origins of digital images 
are very interesting. I guess I'm slowly coming to accept that I have 
to work *with* the look of digital output a bit more, rather than 
fighting against it constantly. As an amateur, the main audience I'm 
trying to please is my own unaided eyes, but they are a fairly 
critical audience. For instance I've seen jaggies on an A4 colour 
2100 print made from a full-size Minolta 5400 scan. I guess I'm the 
type of guy who probably won't relax completely until the true on-
paper resolution exceeds 1000ppi. That's not to say that in the 
meantime I won't be able to make some prints that I'm happy with -- 
it's certainly been true in colour and as you point out, things 
should be better in some ways in B&W.

That said, UT7 certainly seems like the obvious starting point for 
me. I want the flexibility of being able to generate good quality 
gloss and matte prints from the same inkset, and I'm definitely 
interested in split-toning. I'll probably try some black-only prints 
as well, and if I've understood correctly that should also be 
possible with that setup.

Best regards,

-= mike =-