C88 EZ status
2006-08-27 by Paul Roark
I've been experimenting with the C88 and MIS EZ inks. The C88 has a rather modest dmax with the Epson driver and either matte or glossy papers if just printed in the Color Controls mode with no more. The best matte papers look fine, but many of the matte papers I often use were a hair below my 1.6 dmax cut-off. The glossy papers were the same - most just a bit below my glossy cut-off at 2.0. If one wants to print in this mode, however, the C86 settings appear to be quite good. The secret to using the C88 and getting top notch prints is to use Roy Harrington's Create ICC program to put an ICC into the workflow. This allows me to control the ink load on glossy papers. I'll post ICCs and how to use the Create ICC program for this later. I increasingly use Kirkland glossy for proofing and Crane Silver Rag for the final. It makes about the best B&W medium I've ever seen. The C88 with EZ inks and an appropriate ICC is capable of making prints on Crane Silver Rag that are visually as good as the best I've seen. They are not perfect, but in the real world of photography, as opposed to an examination of test strips with a magnifier, only a few will any singificant artifacts. Even the highlight smoothness, as measured by the Photoshop Standard Deviation, is slightly better than the 2400 in ABW mode. For spectro data and scans of the 5% patches, see http://home1.gte.net/res09aij/C88_EZ_CSR_SPECTRO.pdf On a per-dollar basis, and for ease of use, it's going to be real hard to beat this C88 with MIS EZ inks and CSR. Paul www.PaulRoark.com <http://www.paulroark.com/> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]