Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/06/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I mentioned a few days ago that I would get back with a posting on my experience putting in a digital darkroom over the past 10 days. I used Tina Manley's set up as a bench mark, and installed: - -Gateway 700 series Windows XP with 2.36GHz Pentium 4 with a 120 Gig hard drive. - -Photoshop 7.0 - -Genuine Fractals 2.5 - -(2) Epson 3000 printers - -(2) Epson supplied parallel to USB cables - - Epson 2450 scanner - - An old HP Laser Jet for printing plain text documents. - -John Cones Quad Black inks with the custom Cones Plugin for Photoshop. - -Generations Color inks with Cones profiles for the various Cones supplied papers. The driving item in this was the desire to use the Cones and Generations inks and their plugin/profile software. I would probably have gone with an Apple, but the Cones plugin was having trouble in the Mac OS X environment and PS7 that they were not having in PS7 and XP (though PS7 is still not officially supported on either platform). I discovered that one of the major concerns facing anyone wanting to get a digital darkroom is the issue of compatability. All the vendors only sell their "current" product...none will sell you their previous release unless you happen to find a retailer that has an old one sitting around. None of the programs you buy (or hardware for that matter) will "officially" work with anything but the previous releases. Bottom line is that you can not buy a digital darkroom from scratch with "offical" support. ...Luckily reality is not quite that bad. I never had my request for tech support turned down because "we don't support that yet"... I now have everything working (with the exception of having to wait for a new release of Quad Black inks that are supposed to be here tomorrow). The big problems were. 1. Getting the Epson 3000's to work using Epson inks (a requirement BEFORE you install the Cones inks). Issues were: (a)my confusion over the fact that XP adds printer drivers if you don't use the default drivers that come in XP...so you appear to have four Epson 3000 printers instead of two; (b) using USB ports to run the printers (some at Epson said no problem, others disagreed...in the end USB worked if you buy the Epson cable at $40 each);and, (c)the biggie...getting Cones Wells River paper to feed through the printers (a trip to the local Epson repair facility and instruction on cleaning the feeder "feet" from a kindly technician fixed it). Seems that (at least the box that I got) Wells River paper has a lot of residue on it and requires the printer feeders to be cleaned with Q-Tips about every three prints...think I'll switch to another paper when this box is done. And to be fair...if you brush the paper before feeding it you only have to clean the printer about every 10 prints. 2. Clogged print heads from the Cones Quad Black inks. First print looked nice, but needed a bit of PS tweaking to bring up the contrast. Second print was outstanding. Third print...heads were clogged. Multiple cleanings, "Windexing" the heads over night, reloading Cones cleaning fluid twice, and finally reloading the original Epson inks and then the Cones cleaning fluid again have cleaned out the clogs. Cones have just brought out new (this week) Quad Black inks that are supposed to be much less prone to clogging and I should get my replacements tomorrow. 3. Documention on the Generations inks needs to improve. A 10 minute call to tech support at Ink Jet Mall and my prints went from bad to great, but a few pages of text telling me what the support guy covered would help. The documentation is generally written around a slightly differnent Epson printer and different Epson driver...makes it tough to follow, and still doesn't cover what you need to know to get the print done. Overall I am happy with the results. If you plan to implement something like the above, plan on spening quite a bit of time (in my case over a week at 4 to 8 hours a day) getting everything hooked up, loaded/tested/reloaded, and reading enough of the documentation to at least get started. Also plan on: (a) a steep learning curve if you (like me) had very limited experience with PS and digital imagaging, and; (b)lots of experience learning to clean print heads and feeder "feet" on the 3000. If you use a different Epson printer your experience may be a bit differnt. I went with the 3000 both on Tina's recommendation, and because it holds up to 17X44 inch paper. Finally, I'd like to thank Tina, Sonny, and several others on the list that helped me out over long hours of trying to get this stuff to work. I'd be happy to help anyone attempting this for the first time with anything I learned in the process. I'm sure no expert, but I did enough stuff wrong to have picked up a few tips on the front end. DJ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html