Digital BW, The Print

With regard to the "Highlight Point Shift," Epson is apparently 
responding to the one area where something similar to bronzing occurs 
with K3 inks on semimatte (and presumably glossy) papers:  if you 
have a totally blown highlight of any size (tsk, tsk), no ink is laid 
down and there is an unavoidable gloss differential from the rest of 
the print. Adding a little gray over the entire print should solve 
that, but the cure is worse than the disease (or at least there are 
better cures).

As for the ABW settings and shadow detail, the Epson 
recommended "Darker" plainly compresses the shadows too much; Dark is 
better, and Neutral appears best on Premium Semimatte on a 4800, in 
terms of maximum shadow detail.  Printing an image with an adjoining 
21-step wedge, indeed, suggests that Neutral is better than 
Imageprint 6.1 (50-50, black point 50) in that respect between 
90/95/100.  But on the image, Imagemprint appears to have better 
shadow separation on all but the very deepest shadows (and the 
difference there, if any, is difficult to detect), perhaps because of 
superior linearity.  Interesting the different conclusions that seem 
to be suggested by test strips and actual images.

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, mitcha@m... 
wrote:
>
> Clayton:
> 
>  > I'm wondering if what you're seeing is the result of some kind of
>  > driver setting.  There is something in ABW mode called "Highlight
>  > Point Shift"
> 
> Yes, it seems that the  dealer had applied Highlight Point Shift,  
> which I would never use; but that makes wonder whether there would 
be  
> gloss differential when not  applying HPS? In that case, I might 
not  
> switch to a K3 printer because I would still have to laminate the  
> prints, and I'm getting stunninf prints by laminating the 9600 UC 
ink  
> prints.
> 
> 
>  > >The ImagePrint print has more shadow detail than the one made 
with
>  > >the Epson Driver Advanced B&W mode.
>  >
>  > ABW settings are also important here.  There is a "Tone" 
picklist  
> with
>  > 5 choices from "Light" through "Darkest", and it turns out that 
this
>  > does more than an even change of the over all density.  It turns 
out
>  > that the actual contrast curve is modified so that the shadow 
zones
>  > are increasingly compressed as the setting gets darker. ..
>  > For some reason Epson's default setting is "Darker", so
>  > we must be careful to put this where we want it.
> 
> Interesting: so it turns out the shadow detail could be good.
> 
> --Mitch/Bangkok
>