Serious quadtone BW printing(some thoughts from the last 6 years)
2004-04-16 by sdmey4@aol.com
I've been swamping out my work area and throwing out prints from the last 6 years. 3 or 4 generations of black and white digital materials and prints. I have prints from a dozen workflows and members of this list over the years since its inseption. Some Comments and observations: 1. If your using color inks and or toner inks you will get dots no matter what printer or work flow you use. This includes the 1160,1280,2200,7600,9600 and everything in between. I can add that you will need an 8x loupe in some cases to see them but they are there. I'm talking about Rourke curves, Quadtone Rip (QTR), I proof power rip, IP5 image print rip, Brandin/wolfe/randall workflows, BO printing, custom profiles to neutralize color inks(all of them) I'm not particulaly picky about dots that can't be seen without a loupe, but I'm glad I don't have them, as at my most recent exhibit opening A well known large format Silver printer was going over my hung pieces with a loupe looking for dots. I guess I thought since the original piezo plugin that we where all dotless now and that properly partitioned quads where a common place with all the workflows and rips, but this is not the case with a large percentage of the users of this list working with ultrachrome inks or varible tone quad and hex sets of inks. These efforts remind me of the time and materials wasted 5 years ago. People get away with it now because of the smaller drop sizes in the mordern epson printers. My point is for under 4000.00 you can have state of the art quadtone BW printing, 24inches, no dots even with a loupe,some tint control, any quadtone inks you want, no fuss, no muss. How? Buy a used or refurb 7000/7500 and Egosofts Studio print software and Greytag's EyeOne Photospectrometer. For a little more you can have a 9000/9500 44inch set up. I did say for serious quadtone printing :) In general the epson prosumer desktops(1160,1280,2200) are short term machines. That need to tweaked and serviced constatntly for BW printing as evidenced on this list. With the masses buying 7600/9600's there are 7000' and 9000's available cheap! 1000.00 and 2000.00 easily. About what you would pay for the new 4000.(hey,I want one too) Think about this too. No chipped carts to deal with in these models, 9000 220ml carts will fit in both, so no CIS headaches, Easy to load yourself) reliable paper transport, even very, very thick papers, and for a technical inclinded person they are relatively easy to work on. Head replacements by the user can be done for 150.00(I haven't done this, but will some day) Look this list over and see the frustration with cloggs, paper transport issues, CIS woes, metamerizm complaints, dots, shadows blocking, curves unavailble and on and on. You might save youself lots of dollars and grief simply by using a more pro qaulity printer like epson's first ones the 7000/7500 and 9000/9500 and dedicate it to BW. Most of the headaches on this list come from color inks or trying to get by cheap and in the end most of you will spend close to the state of the art System I described. Oops! forgot that Studio Print needs a PC, But think about it if your serious, and I do realize the budget around here is under 2 k for everything but you get what you pay for. Are your scans good enough for the highres dotless prints you will get? Get a 7000-9000 epson while you can, These can be ultra pro quad printers that can only be beat by th x600 7 ink wide format printers have have that extra cart for more tone variety.I don't mean varible tone either, just different tones. Vari toner workflows will have dots. But these(7600/9600's )will cost alot more and have there own set of headaches to deal with. My ramble for the month, Steve M. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]