Digital BW, The Print

What Mark Savoia said is entirely reasonable. 

I've seen a tremendous amount of genuinely professional, traditional 
B&W and color printing over the years: I've rarely seen work from the
best of "artists" that rivaled the routine work of good custom labs
(I'm not referring to "prosumer" labs or to wedding/portrait labs). 

In color, "artists" (except for the few who do silver masking) have 
virtually always displayed bad Ciba. They used Ciba because its
abbreviated tonal scale forgave bad color balance, allowing 
"acceptable" prints to be made cheaply by unskilled printers.  

In the Albuquerque Museum I've recently seen wonderfully well-done
color inkjet prints by Patrick Carr, who prints for artists and
photographers in New Mexico. 

http://www.patrickcarrimaging.com/fine-art-printing.html 

I'm an OK color printer (Ektacolor, Inkjet.. even Ciba for a while)
but Patrick Carr's so much better that if my own miserable photography
warrented an important exhibition, I'd plead for him to do the prints. 


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Mark Savoia
<mark@...> wrote:
>Some of these customers have  
> been doing this for some time and some have not. The experience level  
> of them seems to make some difference. I can almost always improve on  
> what they supply. I am very anal about my printing quality and my  
> customers expect that. This is where I get my facts for the statement  
> I made. Sorry if I upset the group but I feel I have paid my dues for  
> years to get here