Digital BW, The Print

I am delighted that Jon Cone & Bill Bergh have so many loyal 
supporters out there...and I certainly wish them no ill will, though I 
DID find their system maddeningly frustrating and expensive, primarily 
due to frequent clogs.

It may be that, as Bill Bergh once told me, that this is endemic to 
using a fairly inexpensive printer (in my case an 1160) for a fairly 
sophisticated process in a manner in which it was never intended.

Perhaps.

My only comment/observation/complaint is this: I am a photographer, 
not a printmaker. My primary objective is to make more and better 
images in and through the camera, whether the recording medium is film 
or a CCD is increasingly a secondary concern.

PhotoShop is an amazingly powerful and precise tool, and after 
printing black and white photos conventionally for more than 25 years 
it's a pleasure to be able to work on and manipulate an image in PS 
more effectively and in a more pleasant environment than I ever could 
in a darkroom doing things manually.
And no more spotting!

So, yeah, I expected a learning curve with Piezography. I expected to 
spend whatever requisite time was needed to further or additonally 
calibrate my monitor, tweak settings for different sorts of images, 
for instance defining PS actions to get levels to where they should be 
in photos that needed more or less contrast, or at least get close; 
but basically to do whatever it took to get this system standardized 
and working.

But first and foremost, I expected the system to work, on a very nuts 
and bolts level, right out of the box, just like an Epson, just like a 
Pictograph....

I did not expect spend countless hours flushing the machine and 
wasting valuable ink.
I did not expect to find that some of the very papers that are in 
Cones own "Sample" pack needed to be sprayed to hold the ink to paper.

Someone replied earlier that when these problems/frustrations started 
to happen, that was when he (and I) started to check out some of these 
forums, and read about other peoples experiences/solutions to these 
problems.
I was amazed to find all kinds of ingenous tricks to faciliate 
unclogging the heads;
the windex/Fantastik method, blowing out bubbles with syringes, etc . 
etc.

Call me cranky; I guess I'm just not interested in that; it seems 
unnecessarily fussy and time consuming, and frankly, on an ongoing 
basis, I'd rather be working on the images than working on the 
machinery used to produce them.

Maybe Lyson SG will work; maybe it will prove to be an inferior 
product to the Piezography system and Cone inks. Maybe I'll find a way  
to tweak and standardize the Epson drivers to allow me to print black 
and white images to my satisfaction (they do a fantastic job in color, 
and the newer generation printers are drawing raves). Regrettably, 
even Epson readily admits that their printers are not designed for 
black and white printing.

And who knows, maybe in the end Piezography will work out all the 
kinks and be the wonder it claims...For the guy on the list who has 
printed 100's (1000's???)of prints without a clog or banding...well 
brother, I wish that I'd had your luck.
All I'm saying is that for now it just doesn't do