Digital BW, The Print

In a message dated 11/27/06 1:33:16 AM, bcadigan@... writes:


> I am thinking of getting a set of Piezography inks for B&W printing on
> my Epson 1800.  Has anyone had any experience with these inks on that
> printer?  Specifically, did they improve your prints noticeably?  Is it
> as easy as they claim to move back and forth between the Piezography
> cartridges for B&W and the Epson cartridges for clor printing? So far
> Quadtone RIP is giving me pretty good results in B&W with the regular
> set of Epson inks.
> 

Any of the desktop printers are fairly straighforward to change inksets on. 
The R800/R1800 printers, by having extra primaries make for rather more 
difficult printers to produce tinted inksets for use via the OEM driver, so are 
generally avoided for this (besides you can get great results for this from a $99 
R2xx series printer, a more costly R800 isn't really necessary; or a 1280 
instead of the more expensive R1800). So if you go with converting an R800/R1800 to 
B&W, its typically going to be a more involved, RIP-bases solution, where the 
extra channels are just extra channels for some RIP-based seperation scheme, 
not extra primaries in the OEM driver.

The R800/R1800 with OEM ink colors are optimized for color, not for B&W; 
those extra primaries don't do anything for grayscale (actually, with the OEM 
driver, they don't do all that much for color gamut either, oddly enough), but 
they could do a lot for grayscale if converted... but then you need to use a RIP, 
and special curves or channel controls etc. for those extra inks, since they 
no longer fit the OEM logic of how the printer functions. So OEM ink grayscale 
printing is much better on the R2400 than the R1800; you'll see a bigger 
improvement moving to a grayscale inkset for the R1800 than you would for the 
R2400.

C. David Tobie
Product Technology Manager
ColorVision Business Unit
Datacolor Inc.
CDTobie@...
www.colorvision.com


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