Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "dfaprinting" 
<dfaprinting@y...> wrote:

"Might be easier to just buy red, green, and blue inks now. Most of 
the third party manufacturers have those colors for many of the more 
popular ink formulations. Which reminds me of something... wouldn't 
it be nice to have a 12 channel printer? 4 black, CcMmYRGB, or 3 
black plus the others and an orange, or maybe GLOP just for fun."


Yeah - 12 heads. Or 3 blacks and 9 colors with a good varnish 
sprayer head too! I can dig it! Or how about metalic silver and gold 
channels?  Talk about emulating a "silver" print! Common Epson, why 
are you dragging your feet?  Let's get with the picture. We want 12 
heads now!  Or maybe 16... 
 
On a more serious note:
Didn't know they made RGB colors commercially now.  For my RGB ink 
printer the commercially available RGB inks would probably work okay 
but I assume they are formulated from individual pigments or dyes 
not blends so they should be more saturated to start with. Sounds 
like a great experiment for that old 3000 that is sitting there 
currently even less usefull than a doorstop. Or the poor neglected 
900 that lost its black head to one too many vodka flushes. That 
will have to wait a tad though - already too many other experiments 
on the ledger.

But the "virtue" (if I may call it that) of my home-mixed RGB inks 
was that they were already a mix of two inks and with the addition 
of any third ink went toward neutral gray.  As subtractive colors 
the commercial RGB inks would probably tend to do the same thing but 
their virtue would probably be more saturation when used as single 
colors (i.e. a pure red ramp would have a more saturated red at the 
100% end).  But I'm not sure how balanced they are.  Since the CMY 
inks I used to make the RGB inks were already balanced to make 
neutral with equal amounts of each ink, when you used more than one 
of the blended RGB versions they went toward neutral post haste 
(since that meant there were three of the original inks in the 
mix).  My original intent for this inkset was for a sort of low-
gamut inkset.  Not sure it was all that great an idea but it did 
seem to work well enough at the time. And it was just such a nice 
contrarian idea since so many folks at the time were poo-pooing the 
idea of any ink colors other than CMY.   I canned the experiment 
when I found out that Epson inks, when the droplets mixed on paper, 
were not as chemically stable as when they did not mix (hence paper 
that isolated the droplets reduced fading).  Figured that would only 
be worse if they were mixed in the bottle.  The commercial RGB inks 
may just resurect the idea for me.

For another of my ancient Epson printer experiments for the 
historically minded: running a color print through two 3000s 
sequentially, one with CMYK inks and the other with diluted (light) 
versions of those inks.  Hence an 8-color 3000 print. Almost 
worked... The driver (PressReady) wasn't an issue. Separating the 
channels in Photoshop wasn't an issue. The issue was - can you 
say "registration problems?"  Now you can buy the 8 headed Epson 
monster all in one printer!  12 heads can't be far away... But Epson 
will probably only provide it with a regular RGB driver and no 
individual channel control.  Great printers - so-so drivers. Glad 
there are some software gurus out there who like Epson printers. :-)

Dan