Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Tyler Boley"
<tyler@...> wrote:

> I hear rumors that Bowhaus is doing promising things with the Canon
> inks and IJC.


I have seen a recent beta of trueBW - the driver that Bowhaus will be
selling for the new Canon printers - and it is a much improved
reincarnation of IJC/OPM. It is now a single piece of software not two
(as in IJC and OPM) written from the ground up for the new hardware.
It currently only supports the new Canons (iPF5100 etc) as seen in
this Canon site:

http://tinyurl.com/2ooqrf

The good news as I see it, besides the many improvements in trueBW, is
that the new Lucia inks are very promising for bw. I have made (and
seen) some sample prints on SilverRag using trueBW on a 5100. My
experience is limited in that I have not had a chance to see anything
comparable from the HP camp. 

The gray inks in the Lucia have been tweaked since their introduction
a year ago, as has the 5100 (compared to the 5000). Very
significantly, the new grays have no bronzing when printing on
glossy/semi-gloss media.

The other important improvement is that the grays seem to belong to a
 single hue and a fairly neutral one at that (a long way from the
usual warm UC). This translates to far less need for other colours to
come in  and neutralize the scale when printing on glossy white
papers. It also makes any toning shifts easier since all grays are in
the same color family. The only minor exception is the photo black
which needs a pinch of cyan to bring it in line with the grays. 

For those printing on papers like Silver Rag, this means practically
no color dots and no need for coating (at least not on account of
bronzing). With a good trueBW profile, the very speedy 5100 will
quickly spit out a semigloss bw print that compares favorably to one
made with a dedicated inkset! 

Of course, there remains the issue that when toning, as with any color
inkset, the color dots, however faint, may be objectionable from a
"pure bw" point of view. And so, I hope "one day" we will see the same
ink technology in a low gamut set specifically for monochrome use.

As for trueBW, it is now a universal binary app, supports all 12 ink
channels and has an all-new interface that makes it a lot easier to
make profiles as well as to tweak the tones. 

As an example of a sophisticated new feature: the user can link
together the toning inks and then move them up or down together in
precise percentage points. But these points are not "absolute" values
of one hundredth of the entire adjustment scale: they are a percent of
the amount of ink in use. This makes it possible to move the inks up
or down and keep them in the same proportion to each other thus
preserving the hue as the intensity of the tint changes.

There is a lot more, but hard to describe without visuals.
As these products become available in the market this fall I am sure
there will be discussions and comparisons. For now, I think we've
broken the barrier of printing bw on semigloss without all the fuss.

Antonis