Digital BW, The Print

OK, now I feel guilty-I've been running an 1800 with MIS inks for 
over a year, I should've put in my 2 cents worth, but you jumped on 
the Generations rather fast while I was distracted....so anyway, let 
me offer you some options.

First, if money is an issue, the MIS Pro inks are probably your best 
alternative. They do quite well in color, and on many RC papers 
bronze less than the Epsons. The saturation isn't as good as Epson, 
but not by a whopping 20%, more like five percent. Close enough 
thatyou can make up the difference with a custom profile and a little 
tweaking, or even just upping your sat a little. 

Do you want good B&W? I'll assume the answer is yes, or you wouldn't 
be on this forum. Your choices are:

A) Color Profiles. Get profiling software and hardware and make your 
own profiles, (the 'canned' ones will not be good enough) OR, have 
custom profiles made for each paper/ink/resolution setting you want 
to use. $500 the first way and quite a bit of learning, $40-60 per 
profile and a minimum of a week's delay the second way.

B)Download and figure out QTR. There are not many R1800 profiles 
supplied for this printer, but the 3 for matte paper will give you a 
starting point. From there you can build more BO profiles for your 
papers, which works well if the printer is not visibly banding.

If you print color on luster and semi-matte, and think you can live 
without glossy papers, you can put an Epson K3 LK or MIS K4 LK cart 
in the Gloss position (obviously you'll have to swap chips) and build 
your curves with two blacks for RC and 3 blacks for matte papers. The 
later approach uses MK properly, but adds the PK between MK and LK. 
This gives you smoother shadows, and distributes the use-pattern a 
bit better, saving you from having to refill the LK(gloss) as often.

The whole business of swapping LK for gloss works even better with 
MIS inks because they gloss a bit less, and therefore need the 
optimizer for fewer papers.

If you decide later you're willing to dedicate this printer to color, 
you can add more grays-I'm currently using the MIS K4 inks for MK, 
PK, LK and LLK and MIS pro in the remaining color positions. I'm 
getting results that are indisinguishable from my 3800 and ABW
without a 10x lupe.


If you do decide to go with QTR, contact me off-list later, and I'll 
see if I have any profiles appropriate for your ink configuration, 
and further suggestions.

Best,

Steve Karafyllakis

http://www.stevekphoto.com

DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Steve" 
<dazedgonebye@...> wrote:
>
> Along the way, two of the little caps on the carts fell off and in 
to 
> my printer.  I had quite a time fishing them out.
> I didn't reallize what had happened at first and all the yellow ink 
> ran out of that cart.  Fortunately, they were in a plastic bag.
> 
> --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Greg" 
> <dfaprinting@> wrote:
> >
> > One, two, Freddy's coming for you.
> > Three, four, better lock your door.
> > Five, six, grab your crucifix.
> > Seven, eight, gonna stay up late.
> > Nine, ten, never sleep again….
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > So, they are blaming the problems on air bubbles... if you have a
> > syringe you can draw out a little ink from the cart and leave a 
drop
> > where the cart goes onto the printhead. That should eliminate the
> > question of bubbles (though it is odd that the problem goes away 
as
> > soon as you switch to Epson carts).
> >
>