Digital BW, The Print

Many of you may know that Media Street recently announced quad tone inks and a 
proprietary B&W RIP.  Initially they are only offering inks for a couple of small desktop 
printers but promise to have cartridges available for wide format printers later this year.  
The press release (available as a pdf from their homepage) indicates that so far they are 
offering a five cartridge set with one black, two warm grays and two cool grays (the sixth 
position is used for an alternative matte or photo black).  Using their RIP you can make 
warm, cool or spilt toned prints.  You could do better using Studio Print to set up all five 
inks at various percentages and then linearize them (I suppose this would be a "pentone" 
print).  The part that doesn't make sense to me is that when you are printing all warm or 
all cool with Media Street's RIP, it appears that you are only using three cartridges.  If that 
is the case, then I am skeptical about the smoothness of the tonal gradations and potential 
banding problems.

Anyway, print samples of this new ink are on their way to me for fade testing.  I asked 
Media Street about the clogging issue and they replied that there is no clogging problem 
because their inks use a different type of pigment other than carbon.  I haven't found out 
what the alternative pigment is yet, but I am working on it.

If anyone has tried these new inks or has any additional information, I would be very 
interested to hear about it.

Joel