Digital BW, The Print

I went to a sales presentation yesterday put on by Ilford. They 
where selling a complete workflow setup for the new Epsons, 
including the actual 7600/9600. It consisted of Ilford media - 
gloss, matte, rag matte in similar rolls and sheet sizes to Epson. 
They have profiled these papers with the ultrachrome inks.

Their system includes the printer, a printer server with Ripstar 
Studio v 5.7 loaded. This was a basic inexpensive RIP for pretty 
much photography only and a bar code reader to load the profiles for 
the Ilford/Ultrachrome media combination directly off the Ilford 
paper packaging. The Ilford Rep said that as new profiles became 
available, they would be downloadable from their site.

They preferred to sell the printserver/RIP setup as a package as 
they were able to give better support, being able to test out any 
bugs encounted by customers on their own system. Logical.

I did see output from the new Epsons at 720dpi and 1440dpi. They did 
not have the machines there as yet BUT, they where using the 
Ultrachromes in 220ml carts in a 7500 to show the gamut. The Gamut 
seemed similar to dye colour saturation to me.

The output from the 7500(not 7600) with ultrachrome on gloss was a 
bit dotty, but that was only one sample and they had just unpacked 
everything and I don't think the Ultachromes were profiled for the 
7500.

From the samples I saw, the output at 720x720 from the NEW printers 
with Ultrachromes and printed on Ilford Lustre were dotless to the 
naked eye, even on solid colours where few nozzles are used. This 
sample was a portrait of a girl showing skintones wearing a yellow 
hat. The yellow had very few tonal changes in it and appeared to be 
more flat than a photograph, as did the black hair - but not having 
seen the original file, I better not draw too many conclusions over 
that one. The skin tones and gradation were good.

The 1440 sample was a graphic of a painting and was hard to judge 
but it was very good and I would call it true photographic quality 
with good tonal seperations. The 720dpi setting was similar to 
machine print quality in my opinion.

The fact that they were sampled onto 8x10 was great as that has been 
the downfall with the older series.

As I said, I did not see the original files. The 720dpi output did 
surprise me how good it was. Better than the 7500 1440dpi setting.

The 9600/Print server/RIP/barcode reader was about $16500Australian, 
I guess about half that for you lucky buggers in Gods own country.

So there you go.

Garry Sarre
www.sarre.com.au