Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Djon" 
<westsidemaurice@y...> wrote:
> I don't know the history. 
> 
> Did they show Epson how to make pigments? 
> 
> Did someone show a company with roots to Sekei Mamiya (and his
> Zeiss-qality Japanese cameras in WWII) how to make photographic
> images? Wouldn't be surprising. 
> 
> Inquiring minds? 
> 
> Djon


Both of them drove (or are driving) the B/W movement with these Epson 
printers. Some version of Cone inks have been available for more 
years than I can really quote.

Epson pigment inks came to market from angry customers who could 
point to third party inks as being more archival, including at least 
one pigment ink set being on the market. The Epson research could 
have been in development for many years before that, but the third 
parties went to market well before Epson (or at least Epson in the 
USA). I was using pigments in my Epson printer before Epson brought 
them to this market. Early pioneers were Mediastreet among others. 
Encad also had their pigments (the GO inks) so very long ago, but the 
gamut was often described as pale and lacking punch. Solvent pigment 
inks have of course been around forever, not sure when the first 
solvent based inkjet hit the stores. And if you go back far enough 
you find things like the Iris continuous stream inkjets that 
deflected the unwanted ink away from the page (or was it deflected 
the wanted ink onto the page?)with a fixed paper size and rotating 
drum that held the paper. The Iris printer was developed as a pre-
press proofing machine. But the people at Nash editions had other 
thoughts. They were using the Iris printers for fine art type prints 
many years ago. The Giclee name that some fling around (with out 
knowing the origins) was brought into the world to name fine art 
prints from those Iris printers.

Lyson had their "archival" dye inks 6 or more years ago. Then came 
the others like the (I think) Ilford. And soon the gamut wars started 
with several extended (and extreme) gamut dye ink sets for Epson 
printers. Mostly these relied on special papers to get any 
permanence, and didn't really prove to be archival. There should be a 
few people around that used the first Lyson archival inks, and got 
burned by the short lifetime.

In my opinion, it was people altering the printers/inks to make 
artwork that has driven the manufacturers to where we are now. And 
such very rapid turn over in hardware from the old HP 500C "photo" 
printer with it's 300x300 resolution and four colors. I had one of 
those, it was far from the photo printer it claimed to be.