Digital BW, The Print

Hi All:

I have great respect for the skill and experience of many of the
contributors on this thread, and have no desire to start anything but
an amicable exchange, but my recent experience with the K7 inks is
contrary to the accepted wisdom.

I've been printing for some years on an Epson 4000 using the OEM inks
and ImagePrint.  I print primarily on Premier Hot Press 325, because I
love its apparent sharpness, but I also regularly use HPR and Condor
BW.  In IP, I use a tone setting that produces very cold dark tones
and slightly less cold highlights.

I recently installed the Cone K7 inkset and QTR, and was extremely
disappointed. 

First, the inks are brown.  Even on the coldest papers - in my tests,
Condor BW was coldest - the inks were still brown, although the
overall impression was cool.  On HPR, however, and on similar papers,
there was simply no getting around the fact of brown.  (And I don't
like brown.)

Second, the dMax was simply not there.  No matter which paper I tried
- including HPR, Condor BW, Premier HotPress, Entrada, Innova
FibaPrint, Innova Smooth Cotton, White Velvet and others - the blacks
on my IP/OEM/HotPress prints were, at least perceptually, way way
better.  (I didn't bother to measure because it wasn't close, but I
made a bunch of small test prints for comparison, so if you want to
see for yourself, send me an email offline.)

My conclusion from all of this is simply that different styles of
pictures require different styles of printing.  I've seen many
pictures that would look great in K7 - to me, it's telling that the
most popular version is the Sepia tone - but mine do not.

(To be as fair as possible, I concede that the K7 tonal transitions
were indeed smoother; some skies, for example, were positively creamy.
 But they weren't that much smoother, and the vaunted improvements in
shadow and highlight details are simply not there.)

Anyway, so it goes.

Cheers.

Chuck


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "pr_roark"
<pr_roark@...> wrote:
>
> Hi Ernst,
> 
> Thanks for the detailed information.  It'll take some time to digest 
> the information in those links.
> 
> You mentioned the dither as a variable, and I've been wondering if 
> that is another stake in the piezo heart.  With the semiconductor 
> type fabrication, these thermal heads are able to economically have 
> an enormous number of nozzles.  Among other things, this may allow 
> them to have more advanced dithering that avoids the overloading when 
> additional inks are added to the 100% black patch.
> 
> Then again, I think there is a lot of advanced chemistry that is 
> going into these pigments.  Carbon has the history, but my brother, 
> who did his Ph.D. thesis on the vaunted carbon-carbon double bond, 
> did not think carbon alone would be the ultimate inkjet black 
> pigment.  I think we'll see more neutral, blacker, and possibly even 
> more lightfast black pigments in the future.
> 
> Paul
> www.PaulRoark.com
>