Digital BW, The Print

Hi , I have a MIS CFS VM Hex set on my  Epson 1200 and am still 
in the experimenting phase. So far I have not been able to get 
consistent good results with it. Here are my two complaints :
1. The blacks are not consistent all the way through the gray 
scale step wedge. The darker shadow areas from about 50 
down to 12 are all very similar to each other in tonality  and then it 
suddenly jumps to a rich , deep black at the 0 step. So the blacks 
are there but not evenly distributed. In 'real' images the shadow 
areas look very flat , only the deepest' 0-value- shadows are nice 
and black. 
2. The inks seem to clog up very easily. It seems like EVERY 
time before I print I have to run several cleaning cycles. 
BTW, I am on a Mac and I am using Paul Roercks curves and 
workflow on Epson archival Matte. 
Any comments would be appreciated...

Paper choice seems to have a lot to do with the black issue - I've had
much better blacks on Somerset Enhanced and Legion Matte than on the
Epson papers. You also want to be sure that the blacks in your digital
file are REALLY black - if your monitor's brightness is set oddly you
might be seeing black in areas that are really dark grey.

That said, I have trouble getting a really rich black too a lot of the
time, and if you find more information I'd love to hear about it :)

-cb

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "wolfmann37122"
<wolfmann37122@y...> wrote:

> Hi , I have a MIS CFS VM Hex set on my  Epson 1200 and am still 
> in the experimenting phase. So far I have not been able to get 
> consistent good results with it. Here are my two complaints :
> 1. The blacks are not consistent all the way through the gray 
> scale step wedge. The darker shadow areas from about 50 
> down to 12 are all very similar to each other in tonality  and then it 
> suddenly jumps to a rich , deep black at the 0 step. So the blacks 
> are there but not evenly distributed. In 'real' images the shadow 
> areas look very flat , only the deepest' 0-value- shadows are nice 
> and black. 
> 2. The inks seem to clog up very easily. It seems like EVERY 
> time before I print I have to run several cleaning cycles. 
> BTW, I am on a Mac and I am using Paul Roercks curves and 
> workflow on Epson archival Matte. 
> Any comments would be appreciated...

Well, that's why I tested with a step wedge to make sure I have 
all the tonalities in the file. And again, the blacks are THERE, 
they are just not on the right places. My monitor btw is calibrated. 
I might try these other papers , but I know that's not the cause of 
the problem. 
Wolf