Digital BW, The Print

> From: Andre Vallejo [mailto:mastologia@...]
>
> As always,I'm trying to consistently match my mono prints
> (MIS-UT-FSN,Epson 1160,matte and smooth pearl paper).
> So I wrote to a known professional profiler maker to see if I
> could have one made for this combinations. I quote the answer:
>
> " Quad-tone ink sets require proprietary software code to be used
> instead of the standard color ink set.  Standard color ICC
> profiles are not useable with these ink sets because of the
> proprietary software code.  The only place you can get profiles
> for quad-tone ink sets is from the supplier of the specific ink set.  "
>
> I'm not sure I understand what the problem is...If one has the
> spectrophotometer,the printed patch and the profiling
> software,what's the problem?

The problem is that a quadtone (or hextone) inkset typically uses the
manufacturer's RGB driver, letting it believe that it is actually printing
in color. When printing color, there is only one combination of R, G and B
values that will translate into any particular color, but when printing with
quadtones, there may be many different combinations that yield the same
density of gray. Profiling software, which expects to operate on colors,
will be hopelessly confused by the many test patches which look like the
same color of gray.

--

Ciao,                   Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                    mailto:pderocco@...