Digital BW, The Print

Peter, Carl, & Walt,

AFAIK there is no black-only mode in my Windows Epson driver - this must be 
just a Mac thing.

As for the AdvancedB&W mode, there is no need to peer at prints looking for 
dots of different colors. Just print a patch to file and decode the file and 
you can see exactly how many dots of each color are used in that patch. I 
posted the results for my R2400 in AdvancedB&W mode using the default 
Neutral/Darker setting on Premium Glossy. In case you didn't see them, here 
is a summary again:-


"Looking at the printer files (with help from Roy Harrington) of 21 neutral 
patches (from 0-255) it seems that the three blacks are the main inks used 
throughout the range.  The PK ink is
used from 0-90, the lk ink from 0-170, and the llk ink from 20-250. No inks 
are used at 255 unless you check the Highlight Point Shift box, as I 
explained in an earlier post.

The neutral toning is done with light magenta and light cyan througout the
whole range 0-250, and yellow is also used from 5-250. Amounts of toning are
variable, but at 210 for example (where only the smallest dots are used for
each ink) 72% of the ink was llk, 16% lm, 10% lc, and 1% Y. At 250, the llk
was 82%, with 9% lm, 7.5% lc, and 1.5% Y.

Further down the scale, I can't directly compare the % of the different inks
because the blacks, and occasionally the lm, use medium drops as well as
fine, and I don't know the exact size ration of the three sizes of drops
(does anyone else?), whereas the others usually use just fine drops."


I have now found some figures for the sizes of the different drops, so I 
could work out the exact proportions of dots for all the 21 patches, but I'm 
not sure its worth the effort!

Bob Frost.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "wwodets" <odets@...>


Carl-

I've examined several ABW (not "BO") prints under a 7-35X Nikon zoom
microscope and I've never seen anything like the amount of color in
your scan.  What I've seen is perhaps 10% of that amount of color and
that little bit only in the extreme, very thin highlights.  What you
show there is completely unlike anything I've seen from this printer
in ABW.  Perhaps the ABW actually uses less color than the "black"
mode or perhaps these prints are all over the board.  It is amazing
how obtuse Epson is about communicating about these products.