Digital BW, The Print

On Mar 3, 2005, at 2:55 PM, Mike wrote:

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> I do mostly B&W and mostly night-time stuff... currently with an EOS-
> 20D but with a Speed Graphic before that. Obviously I'm moving from
> real dark room stuff to the digital thing. None of the printers I
> have access to do a very good job. They do quasi-well on color, but
> they are terrible on black and white... It's like there's not enough
> shades of gray to represent things like fog or snow very well. I've
> actually had good results at Walgreens using their photo-paper (I
> believe I got a whif of acetic one day when the machine was open) if
> you don't count the problems with sizing in that process, but I do.
> I bet I don't end up printing more than 200 pictures in a year..
> 8x10 and a bit larger. What I print, I'd like to be proud of. My
> questions are:
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> 1. For B&W, what would you recommend for a printer that doesn't go
> much over $500? I can go more if necessary.. I just don't want to go
> crazy... I like the idea of 13x19 but first, I'd like quality I
> don't have to apologize for. It sounds like there's a long dialing
> in process no matter what you end up with... inks... drivers...
> etc., and that B&W needs a different recipe than color. It sounds
> like you need multiple gray inks based upon monitoring chatter in
> the EOS20D group at dpreview.
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> 2. I may not need to do this myself.. I'm about the shot. I never
> really liked the dark room though having others do my dark room work
> was the only thing that sucked more... too many cycles to get to
> what you want. Are there other options for having 3rd parties print
> these things photographically? Something I can just get the file
> where I like it in photoshop and email it to them? I would guess the
> calibration discussions I'm seeing are about exactly this... getting
> as close to WYSIWYG.
>
> In looking over the messages here, I can see there are TRULY
> dedicated photographers who will take printing all the way to the
> mats. I'm a Pareto guy when it comes to this end of the imaging
> process... I'm looking for that 20% recipe that gets me 80% of the
> way there. I've tried to research this but you can't extract
> credible opinion from mythology or commercial interest. I'll stick
> to using the internet for researching serious medical problems:) Any
> help, or just pointers to the right places, would be sincerely
> appreciated. Thank you.
>
> -- 
> Mike W.
> Western Mass - USA
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> If you don't mind RC paper, then try MPIX.com.  They print digital 
> files, that you upload to their site, on real B&W silver gelatin paper 
> (Kodak Polymax RC).  Good quality, but no options for toning - just 
> neutral B&W and RC only.  If you want fiber base prints then there are 
> other labs that will do it, but at considerable higher cost.
>