Digital BW, The Print

In a message dated 5/14/2004 5:15:42 PM Pacific Daylight Time, 
DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com writes:
Black and White was a lot cheaper, but still several
> thousand dollars to "do it right." Claude

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. Peter
Back to apples and oranges again. Sure you can get beautiful prints that way, 
but If you were shooting MF or 4x5, and using regulated Horowitz/Zone VI cold 
lights, the best 6 element lenses,  and time/temperature compensated timers, 
ARCHIVAL Washers, etc IOW, the best of everything it WAS in the thousands. 
That was the only way to reach that standard of quality in prints. Double 
standards again..........case and point: 95% of B&W prints made by photogaphers out 
there did not have the proper wash.




> 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! Peter

Oh, come on, wasn't the point and you know it. Claude


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. 

Who is "we?" Epson doesn't care to make "perfect" B&W for the minority of 
"anal retentive" people out there (comaritively speaking). They are doing just 
fine ignoring that part of it and making acceptable/saleable black and white for 
the majority.


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. Peter
Not if that's what it took to get the prints to the highest level and all 
other choices were in the same price range. You said yourself the lens was the 
most important, so why be a cheapskate about it if it's that important?
I paid $3,000 for a 180mm Sonnar (sharpest gun in the west) on my Hasselblad 
to do portraits and another $1,800 for a body without mirror cutoff in the 
finder. It was important, so price was secondary and I never got mad at Victor.

Claude


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