Digital BW, The Print

Hello Ferdinand,

>>With a loupe can you see only black dots in the print?
>In the BO attempts, yes.  Only black dots.  

Ok, good.  We know that the 2100 can do BO.


>I don't know what the Epson printer driver is actually doing, but it
>looks like it is taking each image, converting it to grayscale, and
>print *only* the black channel.  I thought BO was supposed to print
>*all* the channels using the black cartridge.

After converting to grayscale there are no longer multiple channels to
choose from, only a single gray channel (you can no longer open
Channel Mixer or Hue/Sat and the Channels palette only says "Gray"),
so the concept of printing all the channels doesn't apply.  But I
think all of this business about channels and CMYK, etc. is irrelevent
for BO.  The one hard fact is the print doesn't match the screen
image.  

If the back end profile is "same as source" and the print is lighter
than the screen image, then the front end profile is incorrect.

What you see on screen is just an interpretation of the actual image.
 Whether it is dark or light depends on the front end profile that
does the interpreting.  When the back end is SAS, the front end
interpreting is cancelled out and the resulting print is an accurate
representation of the actual image, which in this case is too light. 
It doesn't look too light on screen because the front end profile is
making it look darker than it really is.

The trick is to find a front end profile that makes the screen image
match the print.  So if the screen image is darker than the print at
DG20, then try DG15, DG10, or some custom  profile (I use a custom
DG18 for many of my pics).

Once you do that, then use an adjustment curve to darken the screen
image back where it was before and the print will probably match.
All of this (at least enough to prove or disprove the theory) can be
done in a couple of minutes without making permanent changes to the
image.  I could be wrong and maybe something else is at work here, but
I think it's worth a try to find out.

Another thing I just thought of is the Gamma setting.  That also
influences the output.  I keep mine at 1.8 (it can be seen in that
screen shot), only because it's the middle one.  If that is different
on yours it might be skewing the result.  So you might try changing
that and see what happens.

Regards,
Clayton


Info on black and white digital printing at    
http://www.cjcom.net/digiprnarts.htm