Digital BW, The Print

Mark,

You wrote:

>For me, I'm still dumbfounded to know how Paul Roark got such
>amazing sharpness, and smoothness, and detail, and lack of
>dot, out of 3000, with the Epson driver. That print of the driftwood
>...was printed with Epson driver; ...

Well, I'm flattered.  Let me comment on each point separately.

The sharpness of the 3000 with the Epson driver is as good as my 1160 with
the Piezo driver.  It's a very sharp printer -- thoroughly modern in that
respect.

The film was Pan X, camera Rollei SL66 (very smooth focal plan shutter,
mirror pre-released); the lens was the 150 Zeiss Sonar (very hard to beat);
and most importantly, the camera was on a tripod.

Scanning was done by, first, enlarging the medium format negative (glass
carrier, aligned enlarger, Apo-Rodagon lens) onto a Kodak #7302 B&W 8x10
film (tray developed under a safelight in Xtol full strength 4 - 6 minutes).
Then the 8x10 negative was scanned on a flatbed scanner that has a
transparency adapter.  Such scanners can do outstanding 400 - 800 dpi scans.

Careful Photoshop use of unsharp mask and other tools was also done.

The smoothness and detail are both mostly a result of doing the above steps
carefully.

The lack of dots is not really there.  The 3000 does have dots.  So do they
all.  The question for me is whether I see them in normal viewing of the
print.  In that context, the 3000 can do a very nice job -- especially for
16x20" prints.  It cannot achieve the small dots of the latest Epson
printers, but the extent to which that matters is much less than one would
think.  The normal partitioning of the inks by the quad workflow does its
magic on the 3000 just like it does on other inkjet printers.  The dots and
dither pattern are larger on the 3000, but the dots in the highlights are
sufficiently light and low contrast that they have very little visual
prominence or effect.

>I thought maybe Piezo driver, to reduce dots.

No, it was the MIS VM inks, Epson driver and Photoshop adjustment curves.

Paul
http://www.PaulRoark.com