Digital BW, The Print

Hello All,

I have been doing some extensive testing and comparison of Crane's
Museo Max and VFA.  First a bit about VFA.

With K3 inks in the 2400 I have found VFA to be a great paper, and it
has become my paper of first choice.  With Eboni BO, VFA was very good
but didn't stand out from other good papers. With the K3 inks it has a
bit better better dmax than Eboni, but beyond that it is an extremely
easy paper to work with on this system.  With excellent shadow
separation and luminance, images seem to fit easily without requiring
a lot of work (real good WYSIWYG with my workflow).  It's hard to
explain, but just as Tyler was describing how White Velvet's blacks
with PT inks have a quality that goes beyond the numbers, K3 really
sings on VFA.  

However, I was interested in further testing of Max, mainly because of
it's extraordinary durability against scratching and scuffing.  I had
a particular use in mind where this would be a valuable asset.  I also
like the look of the paper very much, especially it's smoother surface
(VFA's texture is its biggest shortcoming).

So I set about to make some prints that were as close a match as
possible to existing VFA prints, just to see what it's capable of.  I
began by printing an image exactly as it was sent to VFA.  The first
discovery was the Max had considerably less contrast.  So I added a
curve to punch it up to match.

The next thing was that the Max dmax is visibly lower.  However, I
found that if I clipped the low end a tiny bit, the blacks became
almost as dark in general appearance - acceptable, if not equal.  But,
as you surely guess, this caused an unacceptable blocking up and loss
of important shadow detail.  For example, in one image a clump of
bushes whose branches and leaves were dark but clearly defined and
separated on VFA became a solid black blob on Max.

I fiddled and tweaked, tried everything, with three different images,
and came to the same conclusion each time: the Max just doesn't quite
make the grade.  As handsome a paper as it is, I either must sacrifice
dmax or shadow detail, neither of which I'm willing to do.  Other than
these two things, the prints looked great, but they simply couldn't
match the VFA versions.

Regards,
Clayton


Info on black and white digital printing at    
http://www.cjcom.net/digiprnarts.htm