Digital BW, The Print

Steve,

>... Light Impressions
>- and others \ufffd say that the calcium carbonate used
>as a buffer MAY (emphasis is mine) cause color
>shifts with certain materials, including pigment
>based ink jet prints.

I don't know the risk of discoloration by buffers touching the pigments we
use, but my reading on deacidification suggests that the buffered mat board
may be useful.

Assuming we should not allow the buffered board to touch the pigment
surface, my reading indicates that while acids migrate, buffers to not.  So,
as long as the buffered board is not touching the pigments, they won't hurt
them.

On the other hand, a buffered board on the back might substantially lessen
the damage done by the acids in, for example, EAM because the H+ ions as
they migrate through the materials will be captured by the buffering before
then can do much damage.  The damage is cellulose is slow; the capture of
the H+ ion by the buffer is very quick.

Paul
http://www.PaulRoark.com

Steve: All I can contribute is my own experience.  Since I have been using inkjet "seriously" (maybe five whole years now...) I have drymounted the works on rag museum board, with an overmat of same.  I use a floating window mat, so with that and the drymount tissue, the mat board never touches the print.  Anyway, so far, so good.  This is with pigment and dye base inks.  The drymount tissue is Seal Colormount and Kodak.  I have managed to fade some prints, but those were with older Epson inks and papers, and hung in an office with flourescent lights.  No surprises there.

  --Ken

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Stephen A. Tucker 
  To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 9:06 AM
  Subject: [Digital BW] Buffered mat board and ink jet color shifts?


  It is doubtful that I will ever print enough silver
  prints to use up a considerable investment in acid
  free "buffered" mat board. Light Impressions
  - and others - say that the calcium carbonate used
  as a buffer MAY (emphasis is mine) cause color
  shifts with certain materials, including pigment
  based ink jet prints.

  Two questions:

  1 - Can anyone enlighten the group with empirical
  or scientific evidence of buffering causing color
  shifts (or "shades of gray shifts" as the case may
  be)? Should we be concerned? Or is this just being
  anal <VBG>?

  2 - What about dye based inks? Any concerns here?

  Thank you,
  Steve T.      



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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

I've just got myself up and running with the MIS FS inks on an epson 
740. Thanks to David for the curves for that.

One question and one observation and one request.

Question:

there is a solvent smell from the prints for a bit after printing. I didn't 
think these were solvent based inks. Anyone know what the solvent 
is?

Observation:

When I first acquired the printer, I had to fuss with it quite a bit to 
make it work, including a bit of windex on the pads. The windex 
seemed to clear up misplaced dots, but the problem recurred when I 
installed the new quad carts (I did my own fill, fwiw). After head 
cleaning, realignment, and purging, i was only able to fix the 
misplaced dots with a bit more windex. I'm happy it works, but it's 
not intuitively obvious why.

Request:

I ended up with a bottle of VM ink (MIS mistake), and i'm thinking of 
setting a second 740 with that, if i can get the machine to work. I 
wonder how hard it would be to use Paul's VM curves on a 740. I 
imagine some tweaking would be necessary, but I'm fairly clueless 
about how. (I would of course be grateful if someone else did the 
work!)

-mattMatt Haber
dance, portrait and fashion photography
http://www.matthaber.com

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Matt Haber" <matt@m...> 
wrote:


> Question:
> 
> there is a solvent smell from the prints for a bit after printing.

However you define "solvent" you must agree that there has to be a 
carrier to the ink to get it on the paper and keep the pigment 
particles suspended until that time.

 I 
didn't 
> think these were solvent based inks. Anyone know what the solvent 
> is?

I'm not a chemist, but on the MIS site you can buy "Epson clear base" 
to mix your own ink. I put this fact together with the fact that for a 
time on my old 1160, Epson carts had a little label on each reading 
"contains di-ethylene glycol". I'm jumping to a conclusion here, but 
it seems to make sense. Paul did tell me that the VM inkset has the 
most volitle solvent of all the MIS inks, so if right, maybe more than 
one is used. So that's all I know about it- a conjecture or two.

> 
> Observation:
> 
> When I first acquired the printer, I had to fuss with it quite a bit 
to 
> make it work, including a bit of windex on the pads. The windex 
> seemed to clear up misplaced dots,

What do you mean by misplaced dots...the nozzle pattern having stair 
steps either too low or high (indicates bottom of head is dirty, needs 
paper towel trick)? Or random blotting on paper (indicates same 
thing)? Or some odd dithering in highlights? Or the nozzle check 
missing "dashes" (air in printhead or clog)?

 but the problem recurred when I 
> installed the new quad carts (I did my own fill, fwiw).

At least on my 1280, may not be true for other printers:
When using non-Epson carts self filled, you can have a problem when 
they are first installed. Excess air gets in which causes nozzles to 
skip in the check pattern and worse, it can cause ink blobs to sputter 
out, usually the k ink on the left side of paper (non-random), but 
sometimes other places on page in addition. Putting windex on the pad 
helps I'm sure but the two things I find help the most is to run two 
cleaning cycles as soon as carts are installed to drain off excess 
ink,  then hit off button and let printer sit for 6- 12 hours to let 
air bubbles displace. Then the nozzles don't "sputter" anymore.
Jim H.

 After head 

> cleaning, realignment, and purging, i was only able to fix the 
> misplaced dots with a bit more windex. I'm happy it works, but it's 
> not intuitively obvious why.
>

(quoted text *below*)

jim--

for the example, if i printed text, the text would be reasonably sharp, 
but there would be discreet dots of ink outside the body of the text, 
wehn examined with a loupe. Also, (when i still had color in the 740) 
i printed an image on both my 1270 and the 740; the 740 would 
have random black dots (again, very small--almost needed a loupe 
to see) in a place in the image where there should be no black. 

-matt

> 
> What do you mean by misplaced dots...the nozzle pattern having stair 
> steps either too low or high (indicates bottom of head is dirty, needs 
> paper towel trick)? Or random blotting on paper (indicates same 
> thing)? Or some odd dithering in highlights? Or the nozzle check 
> missing "dashes" (air in printhead or clog)?
Matt Haber
dance, portrait and fashion photography
http://www.matthaber.com

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Matt Haber" <matt@m...> 
wrote:
> (quoted text *below*)
> 
> jim--
> 
> for the example, if i printed text, the text would be reasonably 
sharp, 
> but there would be discreet dots of ink outside the body of the 
text, 
> wehn examined with a loupe. Also, (when i still had color in the 
740) 
> i printed an image on both my 1270 and the 740; the 740 would 
> have random black dots (again, very small--almost needed a loupe 
> to see) in a place in the image where there should be no black. 
> 
> -matt
> 
> > 

Okay Matt, thanks for the clarification. I've had a lot of clogging 
issues, more than I care to think about, but never something like 
this, so I'm not going to be able to help you. If I were to take a 
wild guess it sounds like either an alignment problem or the Epson 
driver is acting odd.

I guess the only thing you could try that is one procedure that I used 
was the paper towel under the head trick, on the off-chance that 
dirt/hairs under there are causing tiny dots to print where they 
shouldn't. But I usually don't see this until it gets much worse- like 
1/8 inch diameter blobs of inks scattered on print now and then.

One other thought- do use use paper that tends to flake? If an area 
printed black flakes off you would get tiny dots of black spread 
around. The solution would then be to either brush the paper off well 
before printing or switch papers.
Good luck,
Jim H.

I have the same problem with my 740.  I haven't been able to come up with a fix.  I think that there is something wrong with the printer itself which is causing the heads to fire inappropriately.  Fortunately for me I only have 1/4 of my prints spoiled and I can live with this until MIS starts making inks for the Canon printers.

> for the example, if i printed text, the text would be reasonably sharp, 
> but there would be discreet dots of ink outside the body of the text, 
> wehn examined with a loupe. Also, (when i still had color in the 740) 
> i printed an image on both my 1270 and the 740; the 740 would 
> have random black dots (again, very small--almost needed a loupe 
> to see) in a place in the image where there should be no black.