Digital BW, The Print

Firstly can we please not turn this into another Nanoo Nanoo session?  Thanks!  :-)

I thought I'd share some initial testing I have done with these inks while we wait for 
longevity information.  The testing I've done thus far is really only around gamut and ink 
densities.  Now that I have profiles up and running I'm looking forward to printing 
additional, more interesting, images.  All this is very preliminary as I loaded up my 2100 
printer yesterday.  Rather than post a big blurb here with too many numbers, I have typed 
up my results and included the ICC profiles in a folder which can be downloaded here:

http://homepage.mac.com/stevekale/stevekale2/FileSharing37.html

(Hopefully Gretag will recognise that it's not my intent to share the profiles per se but 
rather to post them so that people can make gamut comparisons.)

A couple of brief comments.  The inks are not a pancea for all the issues inkjet faces 
today.  They behave very very well on some papers and "normally" on others, as the results 
I've posted show (and Shilesh has posted prior to me).  Their gamut on my 2100 performs 
better than my 4800 with K3 (MIS Eboni rather than Epson MK) in some areas but not in 
others.  (I can't show a direct apples to apples comparison because the Nanochromes do 
not have an LLK and I am not prepared to load them into my 4800 just yet.  I'd like to see 
longevity tests before considering that.)  You can make your own gamut comparisons with 
Colorsync Utility.  The black ink performs very well on HPR308 with a dMax of 1.96.  The 
same ink achieves a dMax of 2.32 on EPSG.   (Note, you'll see I picked up the wrong 
column for EPSG in the text of the pdf - I'll fix it when I can.)  Even if only this black ink 
performs well in longevity tests it would be an interesting consideration for all the x800 
series printer owners.  We'll have to wait and see.  There are some problems though in 
using an ink which very quickly hits its density peak with the Epson driver with its ink 
limits and linearization calibrated for completely different inks.  I'd be interested in 
feedback on this issue once people have had the chance to look at the tests I've done.

I look forward to any feedback on the tests I've done to date.

Cheers

Steve