Digital BW, The Print

Tom,

But don't forget what an open system can achieve - new job-roles and
specialists charging $$$ who are the only ones who have the time to look
into the black-box and understand what all the buttons on the outside do. Of
course, I am thinking about colour management... and yes, I do suspect that
ICC/ICM is probably better than 'what was there before' (nothing???) but it
also STILL leaves some users wasting time and prints to get colour right
(even when they have made substantial efforts to calibrate their system!)

Piezo is still strong in it's simplicity - even if it is less than flexible
in allowing 'full-control' of editing ICQ profiles and so forth. The choice
to use third-party inks is still reasonably accesible by buying a cartridge
starter kit if you want ;)

Just trying to play a little devil's advocate here - I have no particular
knowledge on Cone's thought process here, and have no particular preference
myself as to splitting ink from software, or not. I _will_ tell you though
that if anyone called me up with a problem printing 'other' inks through the
Piezo driver... and the problems were 'tonality' related, I would be
pretty-much forced to say "Sounds like an ink problem". I'm not saying that
support would cease - but I am saying that a certain area of support would
effectively become 'off-limits'. I imagine you would have similar issues
calling Epson saying you were having problems with ICM profiles through
their driver - they WOULD blame something  / someone else ;)

I believe Piezo2 will give end users more flexibility (and therefore perhaps
more openness) - but also perhaps more complexity.

Just some thoughts...

Nij  [Looking forward to charging ?1000 per day as a 'grey management
consultant' <grins>)



> -----Original Message-----
> From: tomoc [mailto:tomoc@...]
> Sent: 05 January 2002 02:16
> To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [Digital BW] inks
>
>
> Julian-
>
> I wasn't taking a shot at you. Actually, I agree with you completely.
> This is a very valid criticism of Cone. 2 years ago, there might have
> been some validity to him wanting to keep his system "pure" since it
> was undergoing so much development and the alternatives were very
> much unproven. To maintain this position today is closing his eyes to
> reality. To try to "manage the market" has been a big mistake for any
> company that tried. In a field this large, a closed architecture
> attitude will eventually cause the company great harm. Look at the
> success of the Palm Pilot against the mighty Microsoft; I believe
> that the biggest factor here was the developer community was courted
> by Palm... And Cone may be making the same mistake by not courting
> the likes of Paul and John who are delivering some pretty incredible
> tools to us (not to mention they are giving away the help and the
> inks they write for are half the price of Cone ink...though this is
> not about price).
>
> Anyhow, you make a good point on forcing customers to buy the ink
> with the software. I believe that should be the customer choice and
> that most people should and would at least try the Cone ink, so what
> would be lost by the good will of allowing customer choice?
>
> Tom O'Connell
>