Digital BW, The Print

I see what you mean and I totally agree with you. That is a limitation, not all papers are useful for 'neutral' output.

As a matter of fact in my opinion none of the OEM back and gray inks are neutral on most media. The Vivera is really more like a selenium tone on most rag papers like Photograg, but it is pretty close to dead neutral on the non oba  gloss fiber papers like Photorag Baryta. Not that dead neutral is necessarily desirable. I, actually, like Ernst, have grown to really like the print color of the Vivera grays, it is very close to Piezography Selenium K7, but without the 7 values of subtlety of course, and that is an obvious difference.

The other thing about Vivera though is that the color pigments and the gray pigments were carefully designed to fade at the same rate. That can be good and bad. Good if you tone the prints for monochrome, but bad if you wanted to have a gray ink that exceeds the permanence of the color pigments. But all in all they are all very stable in the larger scheme of things.

j

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Cdtobie <CDTobie@...> wrote:
>
>  >>I guess I don't understand what encumbering would be.
> 
> The preneutralized inks are finicky about media; to use other media  
> you need to define your own neutral ramp and blend to paper white. To  
> do that you need to use color mode. Since HPs B&W is based on the  
> preneutralized ink concept, its not really opimized for these other  
> situations. I'm not actually complaining about this, any methodology  
> has it's tradeoffs, I'm just pointing out where some of them are. Like  
> you, I'd like to see wider media capacities and one more gray... But  
> that's backseat driving.
> 
> C. D. Tobie
> Global Product Technology Mngr.
> Digital Imaging & Home Theater
> Datacolor.com
> CDTobie@...
> 
> On Apr 11, 2010, at 10:31 AM, "john" <deanwork2003@...> wrote:
> 
> > I guess I don't understand what encumbering would be.
> 
> 
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>