Digital BW, The Print

As a long time proponent of monochromatic ink sets, for a variety of reasons, I have often argued in their favor for longevity reasons among many others. Anecdotal evidence and my own lame in house testing seemed to support that near neutral monochrome hues partially made from a variety of highly saturated dots would be less stable on paper over time than an ink actually well designed to make that hue on it's own. Conceptually as well, I would have expected it to be better. Obviously there are a lot of conditions I'm glossing over but you get the idea. We see now, due to Marks invaluable efforts, that some of the OEM inksets including Epson's ABW that include color inks in the hues, are outperforming my favorite inksets in strict longevity terms. There is no way to find fault with the results, or now back down from keeping longevity high on the list of concerns after years of yelling about it, with any credibility.
So it's time to accept that, yield that high ground, give Epson, Canon, and HP props for addressing that concern and making good ink.
Actually, once that is done, I'm not in the least unhappy with the tests results reflecting the inks I use, support, entered for testing. Results are good, just not best. Thanks to David Tobie and others I have vehemently argued with for not immediately beating me up when the results came out.
Anyway, 100% perfect longevity test results are far from the only criteria for me, as I've harped on time and time again. It's a concern, but results so far give me no reason to change, and I'm still thrilled with every other aspect of printmaking activity with the materials I use, just have to walk away from the longevity bragging rights for now. I hope this climate that is so unsupportive of small niche innovative endeavor, allows continued evolution of the materials we need to advance the medium before it dies as Jon predicts.
It felt necessary to get this said and done, a bit of public petard hoisting.
Gee I feel even cleaner now ya know...
Tyler