The fundamentals of my approach are rather simple. Carbon is the strongest, most lightfast pigment we have for our inkjet printers. The higher the carbon content, the better in terms of light-fastness. Carbon has been used for printing for thousands of years. There is no magic there. The 100% carbon PK and MK products MIS (inksupply.com) and STS Inks sell have worked just fine for me for years. I'm sure there are a number of good sources for carbon inks.
To neutralize the warm carbon pigment images, I use a bluish "toner" that is composed of Canon pigments. I find them to be the best I can purchase. (I also think very highly of HP pigments.) Weakness in the color used to tone the carbon has been a weak point in third party B&W inksets for years, but the third party materials I've tested in the MIS and Piezo product lines have been just fine for most uses and users.
There are, no doubt, a number of alternative sources for materials. High carbon content with the best color is really the key. After that, see what, subjectively, pleases you the most in terms of paper and finish.
Paul
On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 7:56 PM, richard@... [DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint] <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
I did some comparisons of the STS and the new Piezography UDMK a few months ago and the Cone inks are definitely better. The STS has an oily look on matte papers at higher inks limits that can cause some issues with light reflecting off it (see one of the images in the 2nd link below).
Here are some links to posts I made about the old Cone MK and the STS MK (done on a 1430) and a comparison of the Epson p800 MK, the Cone HDMK, and original epson MK on a P800 and 3880 ( i didn't load a new MK cartridge to test an STS ink I didn9;t plan on using in the larger printer to have to worry about cleaning out the lines and contaminating my "production" printer).Here is my personal take: I prefer Cone inks. For one, I think they are just better inks. Secondly, the quality control there is something I know I can trust (nobody pays me to say that). The problems with trying to order from MIS or the need to not have to buy ink by the gallon and dilute myself is more than enough to keep me from switching from Piezography inks.As for the software, I think Piezography is a good turnkey system that works for lots of people and the newer tools and Pro ink system is more flexible than it has been, but you are still working within certain constraints. That is okay for lots of people, but for whatever reason, never really suited me.I like to strike a balance of having the best inks and also having the ability to customize my setup for how it best suits me. I made profiles with the traditional QTR curve creation tools and methods starting about 10 years ago, but started to run into some of the limitations when making curves with more than three gray inks.Over the course of about four years (and going through more ink and paper than I would like to think about) I developed and now sell my own tools take the best parts of QTR and the flexibility it provides and greatly increase the ease of profile creation and the smoothness of the final curves and resulting prints. I think my latest system is the bridge between the two—lots of flexibility without compromising quality like you do when using the traditional QTR methods. I've made dual quad, straight k4 to k8, or k5-k6 plus color or gray toning inks with the new system, and outside of formatting and printing the calibration images, it is mostly just a matter copy and pasting measurements.