Digital BW, The Print

Hello All,

Since trying 2K on the 2400 lot's of thoughts and impressions from
the past few months have come in focus about this technique.

2K printing seems to be an excellent compromise between BO and full
ink (FI) techniques.  It is just slightly lower in luminance and dmax
than BO, but significantly better than FI.  Is also much smoother than
BO, slightly less than FI, and retains a bit of the crisp edge that
BO users love.  I think this will be an excellent approach if
certain details can be worked out.

The big challenge is the color of the LK.  The holy grail for me has
been an LK that would respond like Eboni to different papers, but no
LK so far has Eboni's coolness or it's color response (Eboni became
warm when diluted), so the LK has to be toned (Drat! Those pesky
color inks again).  Various mixtures of MIS inks have been tried by
Steve Karafyllakis, Carl Schofield and others, with similar results: a
formula that looks great on one paper is poor on another.  So it looks
like a different mix will be needed for each paper.  Mixing inks (time
consuming and expensive) would be great for someone using one or two
papers, but I regularly use five or six and am often trying something
new.  So it looks like it's going to be color curves.

My first 2K experiments with the 2400 and K3 inks look promising and
I'm going to continue down this path for awhile.  Looking forward to
getting some Eboni in it.  Since it's cooler to begin with, it
probably will require less toners to control it.  Unless some new ink
technology emerges, it looks like there's no escaping color inks if
you want smoother prints than BO delivers.

Steve Karafyllakis is currently using a single LK mixture and blending
in color inks with secondary curves to adjust for different papers. 
He's getting some outstanding results with this approach.


Regards,
Clayton


Info on black and white digital printing at    
http://www.cjcom.net/digiprnarts.htm