Digital BW, The Print

Hi, 

I'm new to the forum only in that I have never posted, but have done a lot of reading/
research here. There is such varied wealth of information and experience on this board, 
and I've learned much. Thanks to all of you!

I shoot digital with a Canon 1Ds and until recently, finances have kept me chained to an 
old Canon S9000 (I broke the bank just getting the camera/lenses and my Sony Artisan.), 
which has finally died. As I only work in B&W, this printer was unacceptable, as tweaking 
for color casts just didn't work well. But happily, a friend has found he has no more use for 
his Epson 2200, and so I  giddily thought that with this printer, combined with QTR (can't 
afford Imageprint yet...whew!) all my problems would be solved. I couldn't wait to get 
down to the serious business of printing with a machine that could produce something 
worth showing. But as of yet I'm not getting that kind of output. I know a lot of that is due 
to my incompete knowledge, but I don't think that's the whole story, especially after 
reading about others' similar woes.

While I am happy to see the color cast issue resolved to an acceptable degree with QTR, 
I'm not happy with the Dmax and the sort of vague or opaque quality of the prints. EEM 
has a fairly crisp quality, but as I only use this for proofing, that doesn't help for final 
prints. I thought that Hahnemuhle PR, which I've read has a very similar output to EEM, 
would look better than it does, and with some increased ink output it isn't bad. But I'm still 
not satisfied. And so...

...after reading Clayton Jones' articles as well as some others (Nicholas Hartmann's on 
Luminous Landscape was informative), I think I'd like to try BO printing to see if it might 
be suitable for my work. Most of my images are very high contrast with large areas of 
black, so I'm guessing that using Quadtone inks or UT7 wouldn't really be the way to go. 
I'm not very concerned about minute, zone-type gradations. As of yet, though, I have not 
found a site that tells me how to set up the printer for it, meaning, once I get that Eboni 
black ink in my hands, what do I do then? Which Epson black do I swap out and do I need 
to flush the lines and how do I do that? Can someone direct me to a site that gives a 
novice like me some handholding instruction? I did see Clayton's article about settings for 
PSCS and in the printer dialogue box, but nothing about the ink itself besides 
recommending Eboni.

Sorry this post is a bit long....any help is appreicated! I'd also like to hear from others who 
like/dislike the BO way of printing. I've read that many don't like the "dots", but are there 
any other drawbacks or advantages you'd like to share? Has anyone exhibited prints made 
this way?

 

Thanks for ploughing through this tome!
Sarah


p.s. I just read the article by Pete Myers in Digital Outback about the 4800/K3/Imageprint/
Pictorico combination for optimal Dmax, and I have to say that my head is pretty much 
spinning at this point. How do you all cope with so much information??