Digital BW, The Print

I'd like to correct a reply that was somewhat BS on my part. The "very
happy before, I'm even happier now, it's better, it was great before"
post.
Despite being a firm believer in letting the impact of the final
print, without dogma, be the judge, I'm a believer in the numbers as
well. So the previous was lacking in many ways. In fact, for all my
"is the print beautiful?" talk, I've probably spent as much time with
spectros, numbers, linearizations, dots, partitioning, etc. as anyone
here. This is art, but there's difficult craft along the way.
So...

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Roy Harrington"
<roy@...> wrote:

> I just can't imagine what benefit the user could possibly provide. 
There's really
> only one "right" way to do the dots and that should be builtin.  But
from your
> first post it sounds like they had some difficulties in past, so I
guess they are
> both improving some of the issues and letting you get around others.

Roy, I have no idea if there was anything wrong with the way SP
functioned before. If there was, it was not apparent. It seemed as
good as any quad output I have ever seen. However, I always find
things I'd like to be better with all of this stuff. The one problem I
did have with it, they introduced a function to fix multiple inks
bleeding with the 7000/9000 models. This created less density when two
different inks were assign to the same portion of the scale for
blends. Fine for the 7000/9000s. To my knowledge I'm the only goofball
wanting to "underprint" my K, when doing so the new "feature" dropped
my dmax considerably on the 9600. So I used a previous version without
"distributed". No one but me, and Perhaps Mark, cared about this,
7000/9000 users were happy with the change.
Regarding the variable dot. All I know is that this is allowing me,
with some work, to further improve tonality, the appearance of the
dither in some areas, and dmax. So there is a benifit to me. Whether
this indicates a failing in the previous version, or an actual advance
of some kind, I can't say. You know far more about that side of things
than I and I would take your word for it. I also have no direct info
from ErgoSoft about any of this. From your description of dot size
assignments having to be the same for every ink on a per page basis,
I'm inclined to think this is something new as this restriction does
not seem to be here, if your info is that it can't be done I don't
have an informed reply.
I can't really comment on the potential value to the user, if I'm
given a new toy, I'm going to explore it even if it winds up useless,
at the expense of having a life. Believe me, most of it over the years
has been useless.
In fact, previous performance was just dandy for everyone else. So
most of the time, I'm talking about stuff of interest only to myself
and a few other SP users.
Tyler