Digital BW, The Print

Antonis,

 When they finish with the software will it be one program for 
Epson,H-P, and Canon or separate ones for each?Will the program be 
cross platform with the same features. 
I am going to be very interested to see what Epson comes up with now 
that the pressure is on. 
On a side note, do you know if there is any work by anyone on 
compatable ink sets for the Canon and H-P?

John H.

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Antonis" 
<antonisphoto@...> wrote:
>
> --- 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
>