Digital BW, The Print

Martin - After the initial "missing Septone dialog window" conundrum, which was
solved by putting the dongle in a different USB port, I was unable to get even
close to a perfect nozzle check. After the printer rested about 12 hours, two of
the inks were still missing a few lines, but the others were fine... more
cleanings resulted in identical nozzle check prints, so I gave up and made some
test prints. I was used to keeping the print head height adjustment at
"envelope" (high) because of the Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308 paper that had become
my favorite in rolls and sheets, and using the roll and manual rear loading.
That's what I used for the first couple of Entrada Fine Art 190 tests. Since the
190 is thinner than the 308, I wanted to see if there'd be a difference using
the low position, and figured I might as well load the paper in the "sheet"
feed. The first sheet came through fine, and I didn't see any difference, but
one of the nozzles must have contacted the paper surface of the second test,
resulting in ink blobs that were dragged across the paper. Luckily, it didn't
leave a mess inside the printer. A ran a few sheets of plain paper through it to
pick up ink that was tracked onto the "pizza wheels." The third sheet was clean.
I ran a nozzle check and... ta-da! Perfect! Ran another and it was perfect too.
I don't know if the blob episode had any relation to the bad nozzle checks, but
every nozzle check since then has been perfect.

Print quality... My monitor image in Photoshop is a bit higher contrast than the
print... easy enough to correct. Tonal transitions are smooth. I've been
experimenting with the color sliders for highlights, midtones and shadows, and
am favoring about 15% warmer highlights, 7% warmer midtones and keeping shadows
at 100%. Moving warmer appears to pick up some magenta in daylight, but not
noticeable in tungsten and fluorescent.

The Entrada Fine Art is as white as Hahnemuhle Structure (which I like very
much, but I understand distribution will be discontinued in the US), and quite a
bit whiter than Photo Rag. Early-on, I tried one test on Photo Rag, and the
awful green cast was more than I wanted to deal with at the time. I'm planning
on trying it again today. Hopefully, I'll be able to zero-out the color cast,
and then I want to see if I can get a higher Dmax than the Entrada. I have a
feeling the Entrada blacks are as black as I can get on matt paper. (I love not
seeing reflections, but I really miss the shadow details all the way down to
BLACK I used to get on the old Seagull paper, and selenium toned Gallerie, in
the d-d-darkroom.) Specular highlights are paper white, and there's good
highlight detail.

All in all, I'm happy with Septones. Now, I'm surrounded by spectacular fall
foliage, here in the New Hampshire mountains, and I'm itching to print color
again. I'm anticipating reading reviews of the Epson 4000 that's rumored to be
available in January.

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