Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Tom Baker 
> This is art.  Perfection is in the eye of the beholder.  And,
considering that there are a few thousand 'beholders' on this list, I
don't understand why we don't have more (perfect) ways of doing this.
>  
> Tom Baker

1.  Most people aren't looking for perfection.   They are looking for
some tradeoff between the "perfect" print and other stuff like effort,
cost, repeatability, stability, abilty to view it under various
conditions, etc, etc.

2.  There ARE other ways!  Those five are just the MAJOR ways.   I'll
bet 95% of the people in this group do one of the five I listed.    
But there are even more esoteric methods:
1.  We have a few dye sublimation fans here.
2.  Every so often we hear from laser-printing fans here.
3.  Some people make their own inks.
4.  Some people print onto transparencies and use those for negatives
to make contact prints with in a darkroom.
5.  I have a whole series of images (and a web page) devoted to
printing on InkAid (an inkjet-receptive surface in a bottle) and then
PAINTING on it!

So you're right - there are many paths to artistic "perfection".  I
was just trying to simplify the choices down to the five biggies for
our friend who wants it simple.