Ink Set Ideas and Questions (7500)
2003-03-10 by Roy Harrington
All these new inks and ink sets have been very interesting. I'm finally going to take possession of a 7500 this week, so I have to order some inks. I've liked the VM-Sepia inks for my 1160 and just getting those for the 7500 is certainly an easy solution. But, with 6 inks now and my QuadTone workflow I've got more control and options than an RGB workflow. With the CMYK workflow I've gotten the best dMax by using 100% black ink plus 100% cyan (dark gray) -- i.e. I can easily specify 200% ink usage for dMax. So my idea is to try for using 2 inks that are black to get 200% pure black. So the question is what ink to give up. Idea 1 K - Black C - Black, c - Dark Gray M - Sepia, m - Light Sepia Y - Light Gray Idea 2 K - Black C - Dark Gray, c - Light Gray M - Sepia, m -Light Sepia Y - Black Idea 3 K - Black C - Black, c - Dark Gray M - Medium Gray, m - Light Gray Y - Sepia I can't control the Dark/Light need of Cyan and Magenta so those pairs have to the tied together. So my question is what the dark/light differentiation should be for C-c and M-m and how to best use that to get the best gray transitions. With the 1160 VMS I've measured relative densities of 28, 93, and 138 for M,C,K so they seem to be light,dark,black with sort of a hole between M and C that could fit a medium gray. My first 2 choices keep the 2 sepia's and just get two grays to cover the rest like the 1160. I'm leaning toward the 3rd choice to get the smoothest grayscale and I'm hoping as good a sepia. But do the grays go CcMm or CMcm? If I could buy straight MIS inks that would be nice, but remixing some to get the right densities would be OK. Seems like between the FS-N and the VMS inks there ought to be many possibilities. Any comments, ideas? Roy