Digital BW, The Print

Hi all,

Apologies if you see this message twice as I'm not sure if it got lost
in the ether the first time I hit Send :-)

Anyways, I have completed my measurements on my testing of the various
media settings on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag when printing from an Epson 3800. 

In summary I printed the darkest 20 steps from a 100 Step wedge on
Photo Rag (308g) using the following Media settings in the Epson
printer driver:

i) Velvet Fine Art (VFA)
ii) Ultrasmooth (US)
iii) Watercolor Radiant White (WCRW)
iv) Velvet Fine Art with -5 Colour Density (VFA-5) as suggested on
another website
v) Enhanced Matte (EEM)

I am enclosing a link to a graph of the results:
http://www.rickbehl.com/Photography/Printing/HPR308_MediaTest.jpg

Results summary:
i) All the media settings show reasonable linearity in the printing of
the step wedges up to about step 92. This is where the real blacks
start to kick in...
ii) Strangely with the exception of WCRW all the other prints show a
reversal in the last (darkest) couple of steps (98-100). For example,
on Ultrasmooth Step 98 printed at a Dmax of 1.563 but only 1.54 at
Step 100 (ie lighter) ? I wasn't expecting this. For all media
setttings I took 3 readings of each wedge and averaged them out to
exclude any errors. Can anyone help to explain ?
iii) In looking at the darkest 5 steps (95-100) it seems that there is
not much variation in Dmax in VFA, EEM and VFA-5

Conclusion:
From what I can see it looks like Ultrasmooth is the winner in terms
of getting a reasonable max Dmax while showing reasonable linearity as
much as possible all the way through the darker blacks. I believe this
ties up with Igor's results earlier. 

Post-Conclusion:
After this test I then printed a black and white test strip image from
the northlight images site:
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/black_and_white_test.html

I printed using the best 3 settings from the first test (WCRW, VFA and
US). The result seems to confirm the Step readings in that Ultrasmooth
was overall the best print with good detail in the walls of the ruins
in the image and good shadow detail. Strangely the VFA media setting
results in a greenish cast (to my eye) and some overinking/smudging on
the wall details... 

I have not tried Igor's shadow/highlight settings yet to see whether
they can further improve the image but hopefully I'll get round to
that soon !

Rgds
Rick