Digital BW, The Print

> Black and White was a lot cheaper, but still several
> thousand dollars to "do it right."

Oh nonsense.  I worked my way through high school and college on 
making beautiful BW prints in my basement darkroom for a few hundred 
dollars worth of used darkroom gear.  For black and white printing 
the ONLY critical piece of equipment is the enlarger lens - Almost 
everything else can be scrounged or heavily used and it will still 
make great prints. 

 
> Now we have $500 computer darkroom/video analysers, $50 software 
to 
> manipulate images in 5 minutes that took a lifetime of skill to do 
(ever try a REAL 
> unsharp mask in the darkroom with a $2,500 pin registration 
system? It took all 
> day).

I know, and when you were a kid you had to walk 10 miles to school 
in raging blizzards up hill in both directions!

The reason why we are so upset with Epson is because we understand 
enough about the metamerism problem to realize that it's not rocket 
science for them to fix it.  In fact after about 2 years they DID 
issue a special BW driver for the 2000 that used a different mix of 
ink colors for BW to address the same problem. 

To use your example of darkroom printing, suppose you invested $2000 
in a BW darkroom but the prints you were getting were soft because 
your enlarger had a lousy lens.   Suppose a decent lens cost another 
$2000, but only $100 of that price was for improved optics - the 
other $1900 is because it has a golden lens barrel which you don't 
have any need for.  You'd resent paying that much money, too.