Digital BW, The Print

i got some very useful advice on printing black and white with standard epson UC inks 
from this forum, so i thought that in case anyone was interested, i'd summarize my 
experience. (my printer, btw, is an epson 2200.)

1. the problem. my concern was more the presence of subtle colour crossovers than 
metamerism. it was noticeable only in large areas of midtones, but the effect was very 
irritating. in a portrait, for example, i would see feint bands of colour across the forehead, 
of magenta and then greeny blue.

2. remote profiling. the first thing i tried was to get a custom profile of my printer. i used 
dry creek photo (http://www.drycreekphoto.com/). they did an excellent job, and i got my 
profiles by email a few days after i sent in the profiling targets. ethan hansen, who runs 
DCP, was very helpful in answering questions. the new profiles are indeed different from 
the standard (new) epson ones, and they produce much better black and white prints. in 
particular, the tone is much more neutral. the colour crossover was still there, though, but 
to a lesser extent. using photoshop quadtones, i've got some nice prints by this method, 
although the prints that have the crossover still look bad to me.

3. quadtone rip. phil rose recommended roy harrington's QTR (http://harrington.com/
QuadToneRIP.html) to me -- thank you phil! it's a RIP for linux and OS X, and uses the 
gimp-print drivers in place of the epson drivers. the results are fantastic: no colour 
crossover at all, much better detail in the shadows, and better dmax (at least it seems to 
me, but perhaps i'm imagining it -- haven't measured it). the different tone options are 
very nice; the selenium is a bit too blue though.  i've had two problems with this. first, the 
gimp drivers are a bit fragile, and i find myself often having to clear the print spooler, 
delete and rerun jobs, etc. also, they don't seem to support manual feed, so i can't print 
on heavier stock (such as velvet fine art). it's a pity, because QTR itself is very impressive.

so i'm now considering trying MIS ultratone-7 inks. they seem to be much more affordable 
than piezography inks, and are highly regarded.

/daniel