Digital BW, The Print

Ernst wrote:

> For the newbies it may be interesting to do a Google search with   
> spinics epson culbertson   to see what the progress was in 6 years 
of 
> B&W printing and what hasn't changed :-)
> 
> Ernst

Hi Ernst,

That Leben list series also seems to be archived at 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/epson-inkjet/  Unfortunately both 
archives only go back to 1998.  I used to save all the previous 
Leben list emails but can't seem to find them anymore.  Too bad 
since that is where quadtone printing with Epson printers evolved. 
So here is a brief history as I recall it (corrections are welcome):

After a long series of laments about crappy grayscale images on 
inkjet printers I remember a discussion based on my frustrated 
comment "why can't we do four gray inks with a Stylus Color 3000 
like Bruce Fraser describes in Real World Photoshop for standard 
offset printers?"  That snowballed into a discussion on things 
like "would the grays be made by adding white ink to black or just 
thinning the black with transparent medium?" (I admit I favored the 
adding white route since I thought thinned black would fade) 
and "how would you get the driver to print it right?"  Eventually 
Stephen Herron (spelling?) picked that up and ran with it then got 
MIS to sell his gray blends which he used with his Icefields 
software.  Once four gray inks were available from MIS I started 
playing with multiple RIPs (Stylus RIP, Adobe PressReady and 
Sundance R9 plus a couple others) by converting grayscale images 
into CMYK files then manually partitioning the tones in each image 
for the inks using softproofing done by plain old CMYK ink setups in 
Photoshop (version 4 and 5).  That is what I taught Tyler to do and 
I still have a couple of his early, very nice prints done that way.  
Later there was Horse's (now ColorVision) Profiler Pro which did a 
fair job of softproofing the gray inks with a profile if you treated 
it right.  But that manual partitioning system was such a pain in 
the rear, rocket-science, way to do things that other good folks 
(Jon Cone and the Piezography gurus first I think) carried on the 
mission with drivers (RIPS) that did the tonal partitioning for you 
for their proprietary quad inksets. About that same time Paul Roark 
came up with some good RGB methods using the standard Epson drivers 
and MIS inks. I found you could also use ProfilerPro to make a 
softproofing profile for any of those RGB methods but few people 
seemed to pick up on it. Gray inks and workflows proliferated and I 
had to start paying attention to my day job (which paid my bills for 
all those Epson printers I wrecked with experimental inks and 
solvents) and the rest is all probably documented in this here list.

I do remember late in the game, when I was tired of mutating and 
killing Epson printers, pleading with the lords of Epson for a 
CcMmYKkk printer (i.e. with tritone gray/black along with the color 
inks) *and* a printer that had a real blue ink (for me) and red or 
purple ink (for CD Tobie).  Now we have the 1800 and the 
2400/7800/9800.  So they do listen - eventually.  Unfortunately I 
just read here the 2400 with its tritone gray/black is still mixing 
yellow ink into the light tones (shame shame Epson!).  Oh well - the 
3rd party rips are still necessary I guess.  At least Epson now has 
3 gray inks all its own.  About time!  Wonder if I could put those 
Epson grays in one of the old 3000s (just kidding!).

Dan