Digital BW, The Print

I have been doing all my printing on a 1280 with MIS VM inks and a CIS since last summer and have been very pleased with the results. I purchased a second 1280 so I could check out some of the new blends Paul Roark and MIS have put together.

I gave the Neutral Full Spectrum inks a try using hand filled virgin carts from MIS and the Conetech Piezography driver.

Finally a new color of Piezo print! I like the MIS standard Full Spectrum over the Piezo inks but the color is still very similar.

First off the shades of gray are an excellent match to the Piezo inks. I made prints from files I had adjusted for printing with the Piezo inks and I felt the Neutral FS prints were just fine without any tweaking being needed. Definitely plug and play with the Piezo driver.

Second while this is a welcome addition to what is available and I much prefer it over the color of the Piezo ink, I do not find it to be truly neutral. To my eye the tone was cool under quartz halogen lights and slightly less cool in sunlight but not much. Much less metamerism with this ink set which is very good news! Not as cool as MIS VM with Paul's neutral cool curve but similar. I found it very close to an un-toned silver print which I think will please a great many people.

The prints on EAM looked more neutral than the several Hahnemuhle papers I tried. Warming has been a factor with other ink sets and I may need to wait a few days to see where the final tone will be.

One of the problems with getting a "selenium toned silver fiber" print color is that there is a HUGE range of variation in the color of selenium toned prints silver depending upon the particular silver paper and how it was toned. Personally I toned at a ratio of 1:5 or 1:10 for 4 to 10 minutes. I like to get some color out of the toning operation. The result is that my selenium tone prints probably have a different color than someone who used a light toning procedure of 1:20 or 1:40 for 2 or 3 minutes for archival purposes (now in doubt) or for a slight increase in the blacks without changing the basic color of the silver paper.

As I look at 10 or so selenium toned prints hanging on my wall there is a great deal of variation. The Ilford Galleria prints are yellow warm, the Kodak Fine Art is chocolate warm, the Oriental Seagull is cool in the highlight and a little purple in the shadows.

So while the new MIS Neutral FS inks may match some peoples selenium toned silver prints they will not match everyone's. Maybe a closer match to the Oriental paper than the Ilford.

I want to stress that this is all extremely subtle. If you sit down and surround yourself with just NFS prints the effect is very neutral. Only in side by side comparisons with warmer prints might you see a touch of blue in the NFS prints. Perhaps your eyes may not perceive it as I do. I am very certain that there is a great deal of variation in how we each see color. A lot of it is what you are use to. I suspect my reaction is in large part that I have gotten used to the warmer colors I have been getting from my inkjet prints. I mostly favor a medium warm curve with the VM inks.

Many thanks are in order to Bob Zeiss of MIS and to Paul Roark for working to expand the tools we have available for making B&W prints from digital files. I think that there are a great many owners of the Piezo driver out there and with the brand name recognition Piezo has, there will be many more. Now all those people have another choice in print tone.

So if you have the Piezo driver, order a 4 oz. quad set of the Neutral FS, 2 sets of empty cartridges and a vacuum fill kit, and give it a try. This will cost you less than what you would pay for two sets of Epson brand color cartridges and you will have ink left over.

So, Paul, how about a chocolate toned FS? Seriously, I know you have posted a formula for a Sepia toned FS but I think that there is room for a couple of more shades of FS inks.
 
Martin Wesley


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