Digital BW, The Print

ALL: I just loaded Piezo NK7's into my 2200 and
printed an old standby scanned negative with a full
range of tones including many dark grays.  Using the
QTR HPR 2880 NK7 curves and QTR the print was very
much lighter overall than same on 220 UTR2W with Paul
Roark's gamma 2.2 curve with the Epson driver; or C86
with EZW and Paul Roark's recommended settings in the
Epson driver.  All were sent with a gamma 2.2 profile
embedded - psd's for the 220 and C86 and tiff for the
QTR.  The R220 and C86 prints are very similar except
the C86 is noticeably warmer - but the densities are
quite similar. In order to get the NK7 on the 2200 to
match the other two in overall density, I had to place
the ink limit slider in QTR at +35 and the gamma
slider to +15.

BTW, on HPR the NK7 is less warm yet (near neutral to
my eye) than the R220 with the UTR2Warm and much
cooler than the C86 with EZWarm.  For this image I
prefer the somewhat warm R220 Warm set  - but such
things are, of course, a matter of taste.

The Piezo NK7 is indeed very smooth, although to my
eye it lacks a bit of "punch" relative to the other
two and the d-max is less even with the +35 ink limit
setting.

Am I missing something, or do I have some setting
wrong in the QTR for the NK7's in the 2200, such that
I must almost max out the ink limits and density to
get a WYSIWYG with this system? The WYSIWYG with the
other two systems is quite close even though I have
only calibrated my monitor visually with the Adobe
gamma loader. Any thoughts and advice would be
appreciated.

Michael Vendrell, MD.

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