>; ... If pressed I will say that I have felt that I've seen some level of what I guess you might micro banding on my 3880 – something I don't see with my Z3200 ...
I think if we look closely enough we can see the artifacts of our printer types. A very good owner of a pro printing service in Los Angeles switched to Canon because, he claimed, if you look closely at *any* Epson output you'd see microbanding. I think I agree with him to a certain extent. On the other hand, when I looked at the output of a Canon I had for a while to experiment with, I saw what I might characterize as a "herring bone" pattern.
As far as I know, we don't have a good objective metric to compare the various sources of artifacts. I doubt there is a single measure. Conceptually, maybe it's part of a "signal to noise" ratio, which I'm always trying to improve, but the type of noise varies, and some noise is more annoying than others. I prefer a little "grain" to microbanding, for example. Maybe that is just because I'm coming from the film days, and the "grain" we see in our work is tiny compared to what we dealt with in the past.
So, lacking a way to objectively keep track of the artifacts, I simply use 2 pairs of reading glasses and a bright light. Then I make a subjective decision about whether one approach or another makes me happier.
I do recall seeing more of the artifacts with the clear substrates (digital interneg "film") than with paper. In fact, I thought they were so bad in the beginning of this inkjet period that I used the Fujix Pictrography machine (400 true 24 bit RGB PPI; Samy's had one) to make 8x10" digital internegatives that could be enlarged to (very good) 16x20" silver prints. Some local friends are interested in trying the inkjet route currently with the glossy carbon I'm starting to work with. We'll see. It'll be a good exercise in controlling the variables if nothing else.
Paul