Digital BW, The Print

MIS VM Initial Impressions and Questions

Over the weekend I unpacked my new Epson 1280 and fired it up with 
the Epson cartridges to verify that all was well. No problems. 
Perfect nozzle and alignment checks on first try. Noticed the new 
color alignment feature of small squares. This looks promising but I 
am curious how to read it using the quad inks.

Sunday evening I found time to load up the new CIS for NoMoreCarts. 
My hat is off to them. The vacuum filling system is a great advance 
over the system used on the 1200 that required puncturing the seal on 
the cartridges and pulling ink though.

With the vacuum system you use a syringe and check valve to pump the 
air out of the line and cartridge using the tube that goes in the 
bottle of ink. There is a little clip to seal off the line above the 
bottle cap once a vacuum is achieved. Remove the vacuum pump, insert 
the end of the tubing in the ink bottle, remove the clip and the ink 
is quickly drawn into the cartridge which still has its seals intact.

There were no instructions with the MIS VM inks so I assumed that the 
inks were to go into the standard positions and matched them to the 
labels on the CIS tubing.

When the CIS cartridges are installed in the printer all of the seals 
on the cartridges are broken at the same time just like installing a 
new standard cartridge. End result: Ink free fingers! Not a drop or 
smudge.

I highly recommend that you purchase the extra tubing length option 
and the bottle rack with a CIS. Part of setting the system up 
involved moving my 1200 with CIS attached to a new location. Without 
a bottle rack I don't know how I would have managed this.

When I started filling the CIS I assumed I would have to wait 
overnight like I had done with the CIS on the 1200 with the Piezo 
inks. With that system I had to wait 24 hours for the air to clear 
the cartridges before installing them in the printer and then another 
overnight wait to get a clean nozzle check.

The instructions for the 1280 CIS said nothing about waiting so I 
popped them straight in as soon as the CIS was filled. Printer 
charged up the cartridges, asked if I really wanted to use none Epson 
carts, said YES, then I printed a perfect nozzle check first time.

I loaded a file I had printed with Piezo. Converted it to the working 
space, Gray Gamma 2.2 then followed Paul's workflow and curves from 
the MIS website for a neutral print. The curves were all dated 
7/17/01. Put in a sheet of EAM. Boom! Out popped a nice cool neutral 
print. A bit different in contrast and exposure from the Piezo print 
but no more than I would expect in silver printing if I changed 
papers. The difference in color from the Piezo print is very 
significant.( Probably a shade too cool for my tastes and I will work 
towards something a bit warmer. This is strictly a matter of personal 
taste.)

At this point I should have methodically started printing out 21-step 
wedges (which I will do) but that didn't seem like much fun at the 
moment so I did a bit of floundering around to see what the system 
would produce.

Initial results did not appear as sharp as the Piezo print but I 
realized that if I was using the Epson driver I needed to start 
worrying about image resolution for printing. I have gotten used to 
the fact that you can feed the Piezo driver anything you want. In 
this case it was something like 953.451 dpi. For the MIS print I had 
resampled to 360 dpi after sharpening! Going back and resampling 
before sharpening gave results that appear to be equally sharp. I 
need to go back and print comparisons without sharpening.

This does bring me to my first questions.

What is the preferred image print dpi for use with this system of 
printer and inks?

Where in the workflow do you resample to that resolution?

Do you sharpen in grayscale or after the conversion to RGB or after 
the application of the curve?

Under magnification I see no dots, no pattern, no microscopic or "sub 
micro" banding, no window screen pattern.

I tried a neutral print on Legion Photo Matte and I think that it is 
a better match than the EAM. The color of the inks and the paper seem 
to fit nicely. Paul's curve seems to work well on both of them. 
Blacks seem comparable to Piezo blacks. The MIS may appear a tiny bit 
darker but this could be due to the cooler tone rather than any 
change in Dmax.

I next tried prints using the medium-warm and warm curves, vmh-mw6 
and vmh-w9, on EAM. Both of these posterized heavily. By this I mean 
that areas of sky containing many subtle tonal changes were printed 
as large mono-colored patches. Detail in textured areas of the image 
suffered badly also. The worst was the warm curve with the magenta 
slider at –25 to see what would happen by pushing the system to 
maximum warm.

The warm curves gave a print tone that was similar to Piezo but does 
not appear to have the slight green cast I have referred to 
previously.

I also tried the cool curve vmh-c13 and this also printed well. 
Similar to the neutral curve but it is definitely bluer.

In going through the workflow everything was straight forward other 
then my questions about print dpi and sharpening above. One thing I 
did not find in the Advance area of the Epson driver was a "Half 
toning" setting which is supposed to be set to  "error diffusion". Is 
this located somewhere else? I also assume that the gamma is left at 
1.8.

I also tried some prints on Museo. With the neutral curve the image 
tonality was good but I did not like the cool inks on the warmer 
paper. With the medium-warm curve there was a better color match but 
once again I got heavy posterizing.

If you have posterizing with a given curve and paper combination, 
what is the workflow for creating a correction curve to achieve the 
desired results? Assuming no instruments other than your eyes.

All in all I find the printer/ink combination very promising and I 
certainly like the color. I expected that there would be some work to 
do to learn the ins and outs of a new system. I will let you know how 
it goes.

A couple of comments on the 1280. It is very quite compared to my 
1200.

I encountered an odd problem during some of the printing. 
Occasionally only a portion of the file was printed. It is an image 
printed in landscape orientation, paper in the printer in portrait 
orientation and the printer would fail to print the bottom 1/3 of the 
image. I suspect that I may need to check how much system memory I 
have allocated to Photoshop. Virtual memory is set a 4GB and should 
be sufficient.

Martin Wesley