Digital BW, The Print

As noted in an earlier post I stopped in at Epson and gave them a bit of stick re B&W.  
They were scolding a guy when he enquired about using third party inks and I piped up 
that Epson needed to take better notice of the B&W community if they were to expect that 
nobody would explore different (ie quad) inks.  Their response was to show me a print on 
Premium Luster with the UCs and the Colorburst RIP.  It looked dead neutral and I could 
not see any bronzing.  However, as Carl noted you can demo the RIP as he did on a 4000 
and found that for B&W it didn't offer anything more than QTR and bronzing was still an 
issue.  I would have liked to have gone back to Epson yesterday and pushed a bit harder re 
the bronzing issue but did not get time to head back to the expo.  (As a general rule 
though most of the reps there didn't appear to be that up to speed - certainly way behind 
this list.  For example the Nikon guy couldn't tell me anything about the 9000 scanner that 
wasn't written on the brochure in front of him.)  The Epson guys also commented "you 
know we don't make any money on the printers".  I got the sense they are only interested 
in producing quality printers and roughly covering their costs here, average at best RIPs 
with any pro need effectively outsourced, and selling a lot of high margin paper and ink.  I 
suspect any driver-related development requests will in large part fall on deaf ears.  This 
community (or independent compaanies), rather than anyone at Epson, will in my opinion 
lead the development of RIPs for B&W.  Any ink or paper development by Epson which 
benefits B&W will purely be a bi-product of their work in the colour domain. Which leads 
one to ask if/(why) bronzing is (not) an issue for colour on RC papers?

Cheers

Steve

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "john dean" 
<deanwork2003@y...> wrote:
> 
> Did anyone see anything exciting in regard to the ultra-chrome black and white output 
at 
> the Javits Center? I' considering using a 9600 for dual purposes a a couple of months 
and 
> wondered what the state of Ultra-Chrome with rips is now. Are there guys out there 
using 
> this successfully with great d-max?
> 
> john