Digital BW, The Print

Hi all,

As discussed in another thread, I'm planning to move to a k6 inkset. 
I've Paul's Carbon-6 set in mind and will use QTR. However, my 
questions apply to eboni-6 and the Cone inksets and other rips as 
well.

It will be straightforward for me to make a k6 profile using QTR's 
curve creation algotithms. 

However, these algorithms do not use the full power of k6 sets. 
Essentially, in QTR profiles only 2, sometimes 3 jets are firing at a 
certain gray level. As I grasp from older posts, the essence of a 
good k6 profile is to have many jets firing simultanuoulsy. I know 
HOW to do it with QTR (with the user curve feature), but frankly I do 
not WHAT to do to get the "best" possible profile (if there is 
something as "best"...).

My key questions boil down to the following:

1) How many jets should be firing simultanuously? As many as possible 
or is their a sensible/pragmatic optimum?

2) What is for an ink, with a certain density, the optimal location 
of the peak in the "density-load curve"? When I try to reverse 
engineer the QTR algorithms, it looks like that the peak is more or 
less located halfway 100% (black denisty) and its native maximum 
density (e.g. 30% for a typical middle gray), so about at 65%. What 
iactually the optimum? What reasoning is behind it?
  
3) What is the cumulative ink load (adding the loads of all jets at a 
certain gray level) that one can allow? Should I limit this to to the 
ink load level on which one single inks saturates (as determined by 
the procedure tath Tom Moore explains is the QTR manual)? Or can one 
go higher? I've done some simulations in Excel, and it turns out that 
keeping the ink load low is at odds with using as many jets as 
possible? 

Any insight is highly appreciated.

Joost