Re: [Leica] Black and white printers

[George Hartzell <hartzell@cs.berkeley.edu>]

Simon Lamb writes:
 > [...] I wish to print some black and
 > white scanned images at the higest quality I can, whether that is as good as
 > or nearly as good as darkroom produced prints.  Can anyone who has started
 > down this road, and therefore has real world views on using such technology,
 > provide me with some guidance as to the state-of-the art as it currently
 > exists. [...]  I will mainly be printing 10x8 [...]

Simon,

In the inkjet world, the state of the art is the 1160.  If you need
bigger prints than the 1160 can produce, the 3000 seems to be the
choice.  The 3000 supposedly has slightly lower quality than the 1160
but it's only supposed to be really noticeable a nose-length away.

Jon's Piezography system has two neat features:

  1) It uses a proprietary dithering technique that let's is get away
     with smaller dots than the standard epson driver.  This is a BIG
     deal on the 3000, and less necessary on the 1160 with it's
     smaller dots.

  2) It automatically takes care of mapping the images 256 tones in
     your grayscale image to combinations of the quadblack inks.  You
     don't need to flatten layers, or anything.   Just export to the
     driver.

It's least flexible aspect is that it only works w/ Jon's inkset.
This is:

  a) expensive, compared to other quadblack ink sets.
  b) limiting if you don't like the tone (neutral at "best", quite
     warm otherwise).  Rumors of a colder ink set abound, but...

It is possible to get photoshop to map grayscales to ink combo's using 
its cmyk tools, and there are some pre-worked curves available.  It's
a bit tougher but gives you the choice of alternate ink sets.  Some
folks even run Jon's inks through the epson driver this way.

Best bet is probably to get a sample print from Jon, then see if you
can find someone who will print some of and mail you some prints.

g.