Digital BW, The Print

Hi Antonis,

I have been following closely all the comments about IJC/OPM and its release on the Windows platform. Of course, I've been somewhat familiar with it for a couple of years, now, and had researched it for my own B&W printing back when I exclusively used third-party quadtone inksets. However, about a year ago I moved to ImagePrint for both color and B&W output because I was totally fed up with running multiple printers and nozzle checks/cleanings/clogs/etc.

I have been very satisfied with my B&W IP prints on both Epson Velvet and Moab Natural. However, I'm limited to the inks supported by Colorbyte. Though I'm not that interested in endless tweaking of my B&W workflow I am concerned about producing the absolute best B&W prints that I can. Therefore, when I read on this forum that Bowhaus was releasing IJC/OPM on the Windows platform I became intrigued, once again!

Currently, the Epson 2200 with UC inks is my printer of choice driven, as stated above, by IP 6.0 for both color and B&W. But, if I can obtain better output or different "colors" of overall tone--I've never been impressed with IP's sepia tone, for example--that's something that I cannot ignore. If you're familiar with the capability of ImagePrint and its output, could you provide some sort of comparison between IJC/OPM and IP? Specifically, I'm interested in the quality difference (if any), the difficulty of building the profiles (I don't own a densitometer), and the tonality obtainable from cool blue tones to warm sepia tones. I'm assuming here use of the UC inkset on the 2200 or some sort of toning inkset like those available from MIS. But, I do have an Epson 1270 and Epson 1160 lying about, not doing much these days, since I gave up dedicated quadtone printing. One of Jon Cone's Piezotone inksets might be nice to experiment with...

Any insight you might provide would be greatly appreciated as I'm trying to make a buying decision before 1/5/05 (discount on the pre-release version.) Anyone else who would care to voice an opinion, please do.

Thank you,
Alan Huntley

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