Digital BW, The Print

It is my understanding that the Daylight Darkroom inks are a mix of  
two old sets of inks - the quad blacks and the C, M, and Y from the  
Small Gamut inkset (at lest that is what the beta testers reported  
early in the game).   I've seen sample prints made with these inks on  
Darkroom Gloss and although metamerism is much better controlled  
compared to prints made with the straight quad blacks it was still  
present in the form of a slight green cast in daylight.  They did  
eliminate the garish magenta of Quad Black prints under incandescent  
lighting.  So, same old inks but new papers (nice) and a different  
way of mixing the inks to generate gray tones and control metamerism  
(partially).  As Tyler said, they should have made an effort to fix  
the metamerism problem by formulating new inks.  They didn't and  
their "shortcut" approach doesn't cut it - at least for me.

Carl

On May 7, 2005, at 2:45 AM, Kip Babington wrote:

> I was browsing the Inkjet Goodies site today and noticed that the  
> Lyson
> Darkroom glossy paper was one they offered.  I've used the Lyson Quad
> Black inks for several years in a Canon S9000 printer with so-so  
> results
> on Ilford Galerie Smooth Gloss and Smooth Pearl papers (results were
> better on the Lyson brand papers, but they're considerably more
> expensive than Ilford so I didn't use them much.)  I wondered if  
> the new
> Lyson papers might work better than the old with my inks, and wrote
> Inkjet Goodies to see if they had any info.  Here is the essence of
> their reply (which arrived about 20 minutes after I sent my inquiry  
> - I
> was very impressed.)
>
> I have spoken with Lyson about this to get a second opinion.  The
> daylight darkroom paper is again designed to work specifically with  
> the
> darkroom inks on the Epson 1280, 2000p, 2200, 4000 and 7600/9600 only.
> You are correct they are not going to expand that inkset to include
> Canon printers so it may not give you the quality you are looking  
> for by
> using that paper with the Quad Black inks.  Our Lyson distributor  
> has no
> idea if the Daylight Darkroom paper will work well without the
> corresponding inks, so it would be an experiment on your part to  
> try them.
> He did let me know that the formulation of the Quad Black inks and
> Daylight Darkroom are very different, and we would all like to know  
> your
> results if you decided to try.
>
> So according to Lyson this is not just the same old ink.  I don't have
> one of the specified Epson printers and don't plan to get one (I use
> mostly a C84/EZ setup now and am very pleased with the results on  
> matte
> paper) and decided not to see if the new papers worked with the Quad
> Black inks.  If I had more time and were still as interested in glossy
> prints as I used to be I might have taken on the experiment, but as it
> is I'll leave it to others.  I did see a post (maybe it was earlier in
> this thread) that someone had seen a sample print done by Lyson  
> with the
> full Daylight Darkroom process and thought it was outstanding.
>
> Cheers,
> Kip
>
> Tyler Boley wrote:
>
>
>> --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, hogarth@s...  
>> wrote:
>> ...
>>
>>
>>
>>> The Lysons are dye inks. But the metamerism you are seeing isn't  
>>> due to
>>> the dye inks. It's due, I think, to Lyson using a mixture of  
>>> color inks
>>> to make gray, instead of using a gray ink.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> That's been the word all along. Few people now hearing about this
>> "new" darkroom series realize that it's the same darn ink I and many
>> tried years ago before there was even a Piezography product. We all
>> gave up on it back then because of metamerism despite great Wilhelm
>> ratings.
>> It's not at all the same
>> ...
>>
>>
>>
>>> It's a shame really. The Dmax performance of the Lyson dyes is
>>> outstanding. The Darkroom line of papers is also outstanding and it
>>> really only works well with dye inks...
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> It's a shame this stuff wasn't reformulated from the ground up years
>> ago, we could use this alternative to the art papers and pigment.
>> They've updated Fotonics, developed Cave Paints, but keep pushing  
>> this
>> stuff. Their only market will be the naive.
>>
>> Tyler
>>
>>
>>