Digital BW, The Print

I've just spent the last four hours cleaning, flushing and refilling
my old 2100 color cartridges with ultratones. Most of the time was
spent making mistakes which I hopefully don't have to do again, but
eventually I got it right. I'd be happy to give the exact procedure
for this if anyone's interested. It basically involves flushing the
cartridges with tap water and inserting the new ink using a vacuum
refill method.

My printer now gives me perfect nozzle checks and prints that look
pretty damn good! A straight grayscale print with no modifications
look very warm, and if I add magenta to the image the print gets
cooler and cooler until it looks neutral, after which it shifts
towards blue. I get some slight color crossover from the toner inks in
the shadow areas when I make cool prints, otherwise everything looks
fine. I think this problem can be easily fixed with some tweaking in
curves.

None of paul's curves give me anything even remotely close to a usable
print. I expected that, after all this is not only a different printer
but it also has an additional ink. I'm not really sure any curves are
needed though, since shifting the amount of magenta basically gives me
the control I need.

The conclusion so far is that it works extremely well. I'll report
back when I've had the chance to test more.

Two more things I've noticed since last night:

1. I can now make lightning fast prints at 720dpi that are nearly
indistinguishable from 1440dpi. This is a major improvement from
PowerRIP where I had to use 2880dpi to get decent results. I can see a
slight difference with a loupe, but even then it's very hard to tell.

2. RC papers will not behave well without making some major tweaks in
curves. I tried both Epson Premium Semigloss and Ilford Smooth Pearl.
I was not able to get decent output the short time I tried. The output
was much warmer than on matte papers and when I tried to make the
print cooler the shadows stayed warm no matter what I did. I switched
back to matte black very quickly. I'll experiment more with this some
other day. I also had to reduce ink laydown in the Epson driver by 20%.