Digital BW, The Print

Garry,

Fear not, the MIS VM workflows for the hextone printers work fine for those
printers and the hextone MIS VM inks.

The problem I was outlining is that the Piezo "hextone" system is actually a
quad -- it has only four ink shades.  As such, when the Epson driver tries
to do it's built-in cross-over/transition from the light/photos inks to the
full strength color inks, you get a persistent flat spot on the curve.  I
was never able to overcome the problem when I tried.

More generally, when you consider inksets and workflows, you need to
carefully match the inkset with the specific workflow that was designed to
work with it.  You won't have success using Chris Brandin's workflow with
the MIS VM inkset.  Chris's workflow was designed for the standard MIS
quads.

Each quad inkset type has different ink densities and thus needs different
workflows.  The Piezo inkset and the FS inksets are compatible and
interchangeable.  However, that is where the inkset interchangeability ends.
(The VM inkset uses the same black and cyan ink densities as the FS/Piezo
systems, but the magenta and yellow positions are different.)

So, you wanted to use the MIS VM-Sepia with a hextone.  That works, as long
as there are curves on the MIS website quad workflow page that are
compatible.  However, the curves for one printer type/model generally will
not give acceptable results with a model for which they were not
specifically designed.   There are usually 8" paper models of the 13" models
listed, but beyond that you may need to do some surgery on the curves to get
good results.  You can ask on this forum is anyone is using the MIS VM
inkset with the printer model you're interested in using.

Good luck.

Paul
http://www.PaulRoark.com

_________________

-----Original Message-----
From: garrysarre [mailto:garry@...]
Sent: Sunday, March 10, 2002 1:02 AM
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Digital BW] Paul, a question (was MIS Full Spectrum Neutral Inks -
Absolutely Impressive

>I have two hextone printers (890 and photo EX) that I want to start
>experimenting with before purchasing larger format. I do very
>warm/yellow sepia with my portrait work and originally tried MIS
>full colour pigs with some better than expected results. My
>intention was to see if this worked before going down the VM sepia
>mix track. The next stage is to do just that. I was about to order
>these inks when I read this.

>> As of now, there is no Epson driver workflow for FS or Piezo inks
that works
>> with hextone printers.  The use of the same density inks in the
magenta and
>> light/photo magenta (likewise cyan/photo cyan) positions makes it
impossible
>> to get acceptable results from the Epson driver in hextone
printers.

>I thought Chris Brandin has work flow and curves for hextones.

>My plan was to purchase neutral-sepia hextone inks with CIS for the
>890, download Chris's curves. I dont have a RIP, and
>just use it  with the Epson Driver.