Digital BW, The Print

In a message dated 9/7/06 1:22:57 PM, sjahjah@... writes:


> I am about to give up, I tried several papers, even bought the
> outrageously expensive Imageprint v6...and, while it improves matters a
> bit, does not provide decent b&w!
> 
The HP DesignJet 30/90/130 printers use colored dye inks, and are mostly used 
on gloss/luster media (as it fades, and fades differentially, on matte media 
causing color casts in B&W prints). The driver blends grays and light grays 
from Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow inks. So any slight variation in neutrality will 
show as a color cast, or a series of them. Moving from one light source to 
another will also cause significant change in the tone of B&W prints made this 
way. ImagePrint doesn't have a lot of good choices for working with this 
printer: there are no gray inks, so it either uses a "black ink only, with bits of 
color to tint it neutral" strategy, which will cause rather weak, grainy images, 
or it uses a scheme about like the RGB driver, and gains some smoothness and 
richness, but at the cost of stable neutrality. 

The next generation of HP DesignJet printers should offer pigment inks and 
other improvements, though what specs have been published so far indicate that 
there will be only one, not two, levels of gray ink, so Epson and Canon models 
are still likely to be ahead in printing of B&W images. We'll know more at 
Photokina.

C. David Tobie
Product Technology Manager
ColorVision Business Unit
Datacolor Inc.
CDTobie@...
www.colorvision.com


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

David,
Thanks for your post! Richard Southworth told me that IP have a 
particular profile, working only on HP Premium Satin that reduces 
considerably this problem. I tried it and indeed it is much much better 
on this paper. Let'shope IP will build more of these prorfiles toa 
variety of papers!
I am glad to hear HP improving their Designjet, but I just bought mine 
4 months ago...maybe they will offer some incentives or exchange 
program :-).
Samir