Digital BW, The Print

I am looking for a new B&W exhibition printing solution and am interested in hearing 
feedback from serious power users of MIS or other monochrome inks.

I am one of  very few Epson Stylus Pro 7600 owners who has ever been able to get Cone 
quad inks up and running out of the box.  For eight months I was able to produce, exhibit 
and sell the most georgeous digital B&W prints I have ever seen, using Cone's Museum 
Black, Carbon Sepia and Selenium ink sets in various split tone combinations on 
Hahnemuhle Photo Rag.  I linearized my split tone ink combos with Studio Print 10 RIP 
software and a Greytag Eye One Photo spectrometer.  The smoothness, rich tonality, 
delicate highlights, overall brilliance and breathtaking split-tone effects that I got were 
beyond anything I have ever seen out of an ink jet printer (earlier Cone quad tone prints 
that I had done by a service bureau on an Epson 7000 were much grainier, by compariosn,  
and had much rougher tonal transiotions than those from my 7600).  The headaches of 
running Cone inks- constant nozzle checks and cleanings, running strip tests before each 
large print, plus the 25-30% paper wasted due to banding- all seemed justified by the 
stunning beauty of the prints I was getting from my drum-scanned 5x7 negatives.

Cone inks also performed magnificiently in my own fade tests, which consisted of 
subjecting various types of print samples, side by side, to 8 weeks of direct sunlight in 
Central California.  Over and over again, the Cone inks on Photo Rag paper beat every 
other type of inkjet sample that I tested.  In fact, I could see no fading whatsoever in the 
Cone print samples with my naked eye (all that really matters, as far as I am concerned) 
when they were matched up with their other halves that had been kept in a dark drawer.  
Only selenium toned silver print samples performed as well as the Cone samples in my 
grueling tests.

Alas, it all came to an end when my 7600 finally clogged up for good, following a 
month of travel without printing.  Epson was kind enough to replace the print heads twice 
at their expense under warranty.  But it was to no avail.  I spent a couple of months trying 
every de-clogging trick I had learned from Larry Danque at Cone Editions and finally threw 
in the towel.  I flushed the printer and installed Epson's Ultrachrome inks (which ran 
perfectly without clogging) , then embarked on an exhaustive and frustrating four month 
investigation of every software solution available for printing B&W from UC inks.

I tried Image Print 6.0's "gray pigment" profiles and found the results to be overly cool in 
tone and totally lacking in character and subtlety.  IP's so-called "tint picker" only warmed 
up the lighter tones, leaving the darker tones with an unpleasant cyan-blue cast.  Next, I 
tried Studio Print 11 along with its profiling system, which was very laborius and produced 
mediocre results in both color and B&W.  Metamerism was reduced, but, as far as I am 
concerned, no amount of metamerism is acceptable in a B&W print.  Finally I tried a 
shareware called "QTR," which proved to be a rather rinky-dink RIP that produced garishly 
colored pre-fab tones with some metamerism.  Better tones could be achieved by blending 
two opposite QTR tones, but they were inconsistent across the tonal scale and the 
metamerism persisted.

Meanwhile, I ordered printed samples of Lyson's quad tone inks, fade tested them and got 
very disappointing results.  I also noticed some metamerism, as they are dye-based inks.

Then I got some Sundance sample prints, but found the tones- a greenish warm and a 
bluish cool- not to my liking, compared with Cone's rich, brownish Carbon Sepia and very 
neutral Selenium ink sets.

I recently learned about MIS inks and BowHaus software.  I would love to hear from serious 
power users about their experiences with these or any other monochrome inks that I may 
not have heard about.

Meanwhile my career has ground to a halt as I cannot fill print orders to my satisfaction.  
In the case of some corporate and institutional print orders, I have used Image Print's gray 
profiles, which I find the least offensive of the Ultrachrome B&W solutions I have tried (at 
least there is no metamerism).

Personally, I would like to see Epson take Cone's concept and manufacture the ink 
properly, so that it doesn't clog.  The one thing I can say about Ultrachrome inks is that 
they are almost trouble free.  Surely Epson could achieve the same results with one or 
more monochrome ink sets.  I have been urging everyone I can to contact Epson and ask 
for warm and neutral monochrome ink sets.  I have had a very productive conversation 
with a senior rep at Epson who knows enough about B&W to know that it will never be 
possible to make collectable, museum quality B&W prints from UC inks.  If enough B&W 
printmakers make enough noise, Epson will respond.

Joel Pickford