Digital BW, The Print

Some might remember my earlier frustration with this machine, trying 
to get one that printed cleanly enough to do inkjet internegs. After 
seeing the results on a R2400 (not good enough either, the dots are 
too coarse) I decided to try the R1800 yet again. I had hoped that 
by now there was a new production run on the shelves, or they came 
from a different factory, and my luck would be better. Turns out 
they are made both in China, and Indonesia; I wish I new which 
location had the better quality control. My current machine is from 
China.

At any rate, this one turns out to be much better, there's no 
microbanding on a normal color print, and what banding does show on 
inkjet transparency film is so fine it doesn't show much even with a 
10x loupe. The down side is that with pigments in it, even with a 
2pl droplet and 5770dpi the final print (on glossy silver-gel paper)
looks like fair BO, IOW still too coarse for my tastes. I will 
probably try some dyes in it soon-I think the transparency of the 
dye ink might reduce the visibilty of the dot pattern. It's the only 
reason I can think of why the R300 did a great job of this, and no 
pigment printer I've tried so far has even come close.

On the up side: QTR 2.3 supports this printer, and has 3 curves, one 
of which is for BO, so I tried that. I have to say I think this may 
be the best BO machine ever, at 2880 the prints are almost as fine 
grained as a good 2K print. I also cobbled together a non-linearized 
mostly BO neutral curve (I had to add a miniscule amount of blue & 
cyan to neutralize it) for Premium semi-matte, so I could try the 
Epson glop. I must not have the glop lay-down even close to right, 
because it did nothing useful. In the end I gave the prints a light 
glop spray which got the bronzing and gloss differential down to 
tolerable levels. 

A side note for all us 'amateurs mixing inks' out there: the R1800 
blue...well.. isn't blue. It is a dark blue-magenta color (blurple?) 
that eliminates the need in many cases of using the less stable 
magenta for balancing out a mix. a little cyan added in gets you to 
neutral fairly quickly with less color ink than the other way.

Anyone have some QTR curves they like to trade?

Steve Karafyllakis