Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Roger L 
Sopher" <rlsopher@c...> wrote:
> C'mon guys, give it a rest...

Why?  It's not off-topic.

This IS relevant to printing in general and black and white printing 
in particular.   The relationship between the reflectance spectra of 
pigments and colors we perceive is important to problems like 
metamerism, profile-matching of monitors and printers, and how to 
use CMYK (and its variants) to produce even grayscales.

Anthony raises some interesting questions.   Assuming that a Y 
pigment in an inkjet printer produces an actual yellow (say, 560 nm) 
what does it mean to "match" this to a yellow on a monitor which is 
really comprised of a red and a green?   If you go to my web page 
where I have enlarged  "grayscale" images showing the actual dots of 
ink laid down by a 2200 you can see all the different ways 
the "same" color is created.   How might these methods prove 
DIFFERENTLY sensitive to ambient lighting and how might that inform 
our choice of drivers or inks?

My undergraduate major was the neurophysiology of visual 
processing.  (imaging sticking single-cell recording devices in 
cat's brains).   So this is a very interesting topic, as well.  

Shortly after I joined the group some months back I complained that 
one difference between darkroom printers I knew and digital ones is 
that many darkroom printers I knew were genuinely interested in the 
chemistry and physics of their craft, whereas too many digital 
printers "black-boxed" everything.   When I have questions about the 
chemistry of developing and printing or the physical properties of 
emulsions and papers I can always find some old darkroom geek who 
knows the answer.   But when I have similar questions about the 
physical and chemical properties of inks and inkjet papers it's hard 
to find people here who know or even care.   Your complaint 
reinforces that stereotype.