Digital BW, The Print

I received Tyler's two prints yesterday. Both are very beautiful, and 
Tyler's doing all of us a great service by providing these at such a low 
cost!

My understanding is that one of the prints is Ilford Gold Silk Fiber 
[IG] paper, and the other is Ultrasmooth.[U].

The IG print is warmer, and the U print has a whiter base.  The IG print 
is slightly lighter.

With this image, I prefer the image tone of the U and the luminance of 
the IG in diffuse daylight. With tungsten lighting the IG tone becomes 
excessively warm with this image for my tastes.

Both are essentially gloss-differential and bronzing free.

On both papers, there are specks of glop on the borders, and there are 
occasional irregularities on the images, such as small speck sized areas 
without gloss and small particles in the finish.  These are very minor.  
They wouldn't be noticeable when framed.

The U has some microbanding running parallel to the long edge of the 
paper. This is especially visible in even-toned out-of-focus areas.  It 
would be a bit distracting on close examination of a framed image.  The 
IG print doesn't have this.

I also made a print of the image using an Epson R2400, InkRepublic CIS, 
MIS K4 color inks, a PrintFixPro profile with extended grays, and the 
Epson driver, printing the image as a "color" image.

The K4 print is more neutral.  (With this image I prefer one slightly 
warm. One of the advantages of the "color" workflow, though, is that 
it's easy to adjust image tone.) It's also darker with less "open" 
shadows.  Both of Tyler's prints have a little more "depth", although I 
think this is due to the their being lighter in the mid-tones and 
shadows.  The K4 print does have gloss differential and bronzing, but 
only when viewed in an unusual way. These would be visible with framed 
images normally displayed. The K4 print has microbanding that's parallel 
to the images short edge.

My conclusions are: 1. I have to fix that banding.  2. Tyler's process 
produces beautiful prints.  3. I don't see enough advantages with k7 
gloss_for my uses_ over my "color" workflow for me to switch.

-Peter