Digital BW, The Print

wow...that is weird. I tried BO with my C86 (which I got for easy color 
snaps) and with the mac/epson driver, BO was basically horrible. Now I 
think maybe I was doing something wrong. Are you using windows? Maybe 
that makes a difference. On my 1280 BO is pretty good, but MIS is 
definitely smoother, and has no hints of banding, and you dont see the 
"dither pattern"...DM

On May 13, 2005, at 9:37 AM, Jordan Wosnick wrote:

>
>  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


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]