Digital BW, The Print

Clayton,

I wanted to chime in and give my findings for the best settings I've
discovered for BO printing on my newly acquired R200 refurb from Epson. 

My printing so far has been done with Eboni from MIS in their
spongeless carts on Red River's 50lb premium matte C2S paper.

Whenever I select "Photo Quality Ink Jet Paper" I get some faint
banding in sections of the print. These are pretty hard to detect but
if you look closely for them they are there. But the good thing about
the  "Photo Quality Ink Jet Paper" setting is that it's an exact match
for what I am seeing on my monitor, which is calibrated via a Eye-One
from GretagMacbeth.

After making some test prints I discovered that my printer does not
band at all when using the "Photo Paper" Media Type setting with a
print quality setting of Photo RPM. The Best Photo setting also seemed
to band just a touch too. These prints had just a shade less contrast
than the prints made with the "Photo Quality Ink Jet Paper" setting.

By going to Color Management and bumping up the contast to +3 my
prints looked identical. 

I'm also leaving High Speed off but I couldn't see any change in the
test print with high speed enabled. I would have to make more prints
to be comforable declaring this as gospel. For now I'll leave high
speed off.

The BO prints I'm producing from my R200 are as good as those I made
with my 1280, and, knock on wood, I'm clog free so far. 

--Jim

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Clayton Jones"
<cj@c...> wrote:
>
> Hello All,
> 
> I got my top-fill R200 carts today and put some Eboni in it and am
> happy to report that it does very good BO.  I found the smoothest
> dither with the "Photo Quality Ink Jet Paper" setting.  The R200 has
> more dither banding than my 2200 did, but is only visible with a loupe
> (some of the other paper settings had very bad banding that was
> visible unaided).  Oddly, while comparing with an identical 2200
> print, under the loupe the R200 looks worse (more banding), but to the
> eye it looks smoother. Must be just a better dither pattern that the
> banding isn't bad enough to ruin.
> 
> Another plus is that the density and contrast at that setting is
> nearly identical to the 2200.  So basically I can print all my images
> with little if any adjustments.  I have two prints in front of me here
> that are nearly indistinguishable.
> 
> This makes me very happy because in my 2400-QTR-BO experiments so far
> I have not been able get results anywhere near as good as the 2200.
> I have matched the contrast and density ok, but it's the dither
> algorithms that are inadequate.  The best of them is still coarser
> than the 2200.  It's ok for some images, but over all not as
> satisfactory as what I've been used to.  So now I can continue to
> do BO prints while I experiment more with the 2400.
> 
> As for the R200 banding, I'm going to try some head alignments.  With
> the 2200 I was able to reduce it significantly by using what was
> theoretically a not optimal setting.  I'll report if I find something
> that works.  That's all for now.
> 
> Regards,
> Clayton
> 
> 
> Info on black and white digital printing at    
> http://www.cjcom.net/digiprnarts.htm
>