Digital BW, The Print

Louis Dina wrote:

>Thanks for the suggestion, Jay.
>
>Yes, I tried that, and it seemed to increase the density of the tones 
>between black and paper white, but didn't seem to boost the Dmax at 
>all.  The tech guy at Epson said that bumping the color density will 
>not increase the total ink limit, just the intermediate densities.  
>That was my experience, but I only tried one test.  It is probably 
>worth revisiting to be absolutely sure.
>
>Unless some new evidence comes to light, I have to conclude it is a 
>driver limitation tied to premature ink limits programmed into their 
>matte paper settings.  So, the solution is an updated driver or a RIP.
>
>No such problem with QTR, BTW.  It lays down all the ink I need on my 
>4000.  But for color on matte papers, it looks like a RIP is my only 
>current solution.  The Epson 4000 driver does fine with glossy papers 
>on my printer.
>
>Lou
>  
>
Lou,

You have tried all the available matte paper settings of the 4000 ?  On 
the 9000 and 10000 drivers there are differences in inklimit between the 
paper settings, the last also has some artificial paper settings (no 
reference to a paper by name) that give a lot more ink. That's what I 
once proposed they should include in the Epson drivers some paper 
settings that are not bound to a known paper but would make custom 
profiling for canvas and special papers easier. It didn't know that they 
actually did that for a driver till I bought the 10000 secondhand.

If you are using a Mac you could try Gimp-print and do the profiling in 
Photoshop, Gimp-print can probably be customised with some help. Slow as 
I understand it. Otherwise you have to get a RIP like Studioprint.

Ernst