Digital BW, The Print

Hi all,

I'm a relative newbie to B&W inkjet printing. I had been toying 
with the idea of getting into this area for a while, and then 
decided to take the plunge after reading Mike Johnston's article on 
the MIS EZ inks.

I bought a second-hand Epson C86 and some Epson Enhanced Matte and 
tried printing with the Epson stock inks while waiting for my EZ 
cartridges to arrive. My first experiments with "toned" monochrome 
prints (coloured through duotones in Photoshop) were surprisingly 
good with the Epson inks and I got very nice prints pretty much 
right out of the box. I then tried "black-only" (BO?) printing and 
was totally blown away with the quality of these prints. I made a 
whole bunch of BO prints (6x9") on the EEM paper (8.5x11") and I 
have to say that they compare very favourably with darkroom prints 
in terms of tonality and "feel" while exceeding the darkroom prints 
in sharpness and ease of local tonal control. My workflow involves 
image capture on 35mm film (sometimes colour, usually B&W) 
developed at home and scanned on a Minolta Scan Dual II, with
"digital darkroom" manipulations in PS.

When my MIS EZ inks arrived I had really high hopes. I installed 
them, plugged in Paul Roark's recommended settings for the C86 on 
EEM (linked on the MIS web site) and then made some prints of 
images that I had previously made BO prints from. To be honest, I 
was a little disappointed -- while the EZ prints are excellent, I 
couldn't see any significant difference in tonality or "smoothness" 
between them and the BO prints (of the same image) at normal 
viewing distances.

One thing I can say is that the Epson OEM black ink is a little 
"warmer" than the tone the MIS EZ (I have the Neutral set) 
provides. The differences are a little more evident when I look at 
the prints through a loupe, but even then I'm surprised at how 
close the EZ and BO prints are to one another. Keep in mind that 
this is pretty much "right out of the box".

Has anyone else made similar observations with this setup? Should I 
really be seeing such a small difference between these types of 
print? Should I try another type of image (i.e. portraits -- most 
of my images are abstracts or urban scenes)? Is BO as good as it 
gets, or how do I go about getting the biggest advantage out of my 
EZ inks?

Finally, does anyone know of a good Canadian source for the 
higher-end inkjet papers (Hahnemuhle, etc.?) Even Epson Enhanced 
Matte seems to be scarce here.

Many thanks

Jordan
www.photosensitive.ca

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Jordan Wosnick
jwosnick@...