Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "joshscapes" <joshrandall@j...> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hello, 

Hi Josh. Welcome to the neighborhood.
 
> I am one of those people who has fought going digital and am now 
> waving the white floppy disk of defeat.  I would appreciate some 
> advice as I venture into this new forum.

Don't wave floppies. The corners are hard enough to poke someone.

Oh, you meand advice about scanning and printing...

> I photograph black and white with medium format b&w film.  I am 
> planning on scanning my negatives and printing from those scans.  
> Can you guys recommend a good scanner for medium format negatives?

I'll have to throw my voice in with Thomas. A Nikon Nikon 9000ED is the way to go. You might consider the older 8000, if you can find one cheap, used, and clean.
  
> Can you recommend a good printer for b&w prints up to 16X20 inches?

Epson 4000. It prints 17 inches wide by just about any length. Smaller, lighter, easier to handle than the 24 inch wide Epson 7600. The dot size is smaller than the 7600, so theoretically you'll get a little more detail and les inkjet dots showing. In practice, you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference between a print from a 4000 and a 7600, even under a loupe.

Are you going to print color occasionally, or purely B&W? The 4000 is a much better machine if you ever need to switch from color to B&W. It has eight ink tanks, which are normally loaded with cyan, magenta, yellow, light cyan, light magenta, photo black (the full strength black that works on glossy papers), matte black (the full strength black that works on matte papers) and light black (a diluted black for light tones). The older 7600 only has 7 tanks, you can't have both matte black and photo black in at the same time. If you want to switch from glossy to matte on a 7600, you have to pull the photo black tank, slide in the matte black tank, and let the printer purge its ink lines. It's the purging process that's the problem, it wastes around $50 worth of ink, every time you switch from glossy to matte or back.

If you're only going to use the printer for black and white, and will never, ever do color, this isn't a problem. You can get a special black and white inkset that uses the 7 tanks of a 7600 very well for both matte and gloss. You set it up with two different 100% blacks (one for matte, one for gloss), three other diluted blacks, a warm tone "tint" ink, and a cool tone "tint", and you're loaded for bear with just 7 tanks.

Whichever printer you go with, 4000 or 7600, stock color inks or special black & white sets, you do want to obtain and learn a RIP (raster image processing) program. Harrington's QuadTone RIP is excellent, and cleap ($50). ImagePrint is more sophisticated, and around $500.

You're going to find this stuff annoyingly complicated at first, but soon it will be second nature to you. It's actualyl simpler than a wet darkroom, it just looks more complicated at first glance, becuase it's so new and different.