Digital BW, The Print

John Broski wrote:

>I'm a longtime lurker who has finally decided to chime in!  

Welcome.  

>For several months now I've been using a refurb 2000P with the UT2 inkset. 
>...curves for the 1280... printed too dark, so I modified 
>them using a "calibrated eyeball"... 
>When you lay the reference wedge over an experimental one, you can easily 
>see where errors occur.

It has always been my hope that many others would also be doing this.  The
idea was and is to have systems that anyone can adjust to fit any paper --
for free and without expensive equipment.  You can use a flatbed scanner to
do this also.  Once the white and black points are set, the Photoshop
eyedropper gives objective readings of density and color.  Even if they are
not as accurate as a more expensive instrument, they are fine for
comparisons to a reference test strip.

The reason I'm making the UT-FS curves for the various hextone printers is
that I hope more people will be comfortable making their own curves if all
they have to deal with is density -- often on a single grayscale curve.

>I've used both the Eboni and PK black inks.  
>The results on glossy paper are excellent either way.

I'm getting better results on glossy paper with the 1270. I suspect the
2000P dot size is larger than the 1270, which might account for its better
dmax on matte paper.

>My favorite paper is cheap Epson Photo Paper from Costco... 

The Kirkland "Professional Glossy Inkjet Photo Paper" is amazing.  At 15
cents per letter-size sheet, it's a tremendous value.  It also arguably
produces the best image, regardless of price.

>just wish I had more confidence in its archival qualities... 

It is acidic.  However, so is Ilford, and they claim 30 years for that
paper.

>Looks a lot like air-dried glossy fiberbase from my darkroom days.

Of the papers I've tried, only the Epson Glossy Photo paper has lower
bronzing (but also a lower dmax and higher price -- but still relatively
cheap).  Both the Epson and Kirkland versions of this paper are a bit
thinner than Epson Premium Semigloss (which I recommend for glossy prints
that must last a long time), and the thinner papers show a bit of waviness
where there is a heavy ink load.

>Matte printing is more problematic... I was never able to tweak the 1280 
>curves to my satisfaction.  So I use the Epson driver with sliders and 
>print without Photoshop curves.  It works, but I miss the powerful 
>control over print tone provided by curves.

>So -- Paul -- do you think some UT2 curves might be a possibility for the 
>2000P?  

I'll put in a cart of UT2 when I'm done with the FS curves and see how it
looks.  No promises here.  There are other priorities.  


>... The 2000 is basically unacceptable (to 
>me) in BO mode, while the 1270 is quite good.  

That is consistent with what I'm seeing when comparing glossy printing with
the two printers.  I think the 2000P might have a relatively large dot size.

>I use the Russian chip reset program to reset the 2000P.  It works fine 
>for me, using Windows XP and my USB port.  No need to mess with a hardware 
>chip resetter, IMHO.  See http://www.ssclg.com/epsone.shtml

Very interesting.  It looks like that utility can do all sorts of
interesting things.  I've been a bit reluctant to download programs from
outfits I'm not familiar with.

>MyPublisher will produce beautiful soft- or hard-bound books of your 
>work.  Hardbound is $20 for up to 20 pages (40 images if printed 
>double-sided, or 20 if single-sided).  ...
>See http://www.mypublisher.com/default.php  

Again, very interesting.  Thanks for sharing this and the other information
in your original post.

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com