Digital BW, The Print

From: "heechee92" <heechee@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2003 10:33 AM
Subject: [Digital BW] 4 vs 6 inkjet for BW


> Hello all,
>
> I have a general question. I'm new to digital BW. I'm getting a
> Canoscan 4000 in a few
> days and I'm just doing this for a hobby. My question is that I have
> an Epson Photo
> 750 and a Espon 760. I'm leaning towards using the 750 for all of my
> color printing
> and dedicating the 760 for my BW work. Would using the 750 as the
> dedicated BW
> printer using the replacement ink produce that much better prints
> becuase of the 6
> ink resevore? I have been doing some research and haven't seen much
> on the
> difference between 4 ink BW vs 6 ink BW. Does anyone know which would
> be better?
>
Six shades of gray ink does not offer an advantage over four. The Piezotone
system for instance uses only 4 inks (1 black and 3 grays) in the six
channel printers doubling up the two darker grays.

What can help you by using a 6-color printer is the total number of nozzles
available for printing. Practically the difference is probably negligible
though.

Your biggest problem is that there are no software/workflows for either the
750 or the 760. Unless you are prepared to do a lot of work developing
curves to work with these printers, I would recommend that you use a
different model for dedicated B&W.

Martin Wesley

http://www.borderless-photos.de/guests.html

From: "Heechee" <heechee@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2003 12:25 PM
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] 4 vs 6 inkjet for BW


> > Your biggest problem is that there are no software/workflows for
> > either the
> > 750 or the 760. Unless you are prepared to do a lot of work developing
> > curves to work with these printers, I would recommend that you use a
> > different model for dedicated B&W.
> >
> > Martin Wesley
> >
>
> When you say software, what kind of software are you talking about?
>
heechee,

When you talk about dedicating a printer to B&W I am assuming you plan to
load it with grayscale inks. If not and you are planning to print using
Epson color inks then the following does not apply.

If you load your printer with grayscale inks, 4 or 6 tone, you have to have
software designed to print with those inks. You can't print with the
standard Epson color printer driver alone. You either need a separate
printer driver that matches the inks and ideally the paper such as the
PiezoBW plug-in, the R9 plugin, Imageprint, etc. You can use the Epson
driver but you need to use a specific workflow that generally includes
applying separation curves to your Photoshop file before it is sent to the
printer. These curves are specific to the model of printer, brand of ink and
type of paper you are using. You can develop these curves yourself but that
is a pretty tough way to start out.

Martin

From: "gaberegalbuto" <gaberegalbuto@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 12:44 AM
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] 4 vs 6 inkjet for BW


> "Martin Wesley" <mwesley250@e...> wrote:
>
> >
>
> > Your biggest problem is that there are no software/workflows for
> either the
> > 750 or the 760. Unless you are prepared to do a lot of work
> developing
> > curves to work with these printers, I would recommend that you use a
> > different model for dedicated B&W.
> >
> > Martin Wesley
> >
> > http://www.borderless-photos.de/guests.html
>
> I have an epson 740 (4 color) and I started with the curves uploaded
> on this site as well as the procedure also in the files section of
> this group.  It took a couple hours to get the curves very close.  I
> am sure that many get better results, but I'm happily printing better
> than my limited darkroom skills allowed.
>
Which inks are you using and which curves? I'm glad to hear you're getting
good results.

Martin