Cone's new HD Photo Black.

[wblackwell]

Truth be told, we did R&D of this ink on Luster, Glossy, all of the baryta papers, and several of the other fine-art pearl-surface and gloss surface papers. We did not try it out with stock profiles on PremierArt Gloss White Canvas but the surface chemistry is the same as other semigloss papers there . . so it should not be off. Gloss canvas can be a problem for spectros of all sorts and is why some of the more expensive ones have better angle/diffusion built in and even polarizers. I will add this to my test roster in the weeks to come, but I think you should re-profile. Upping the ink amount only increases mid-ink color amounts and not total ink load/limit fyi . . . this ink is significantly more translucent than the old PK (it's built to stack and load without reversing). That means that if it is used with a profile built for an ink that reversed in any way, and that limits the K amount, it would/could print off.

FYI: L* of 20.5 is greater than the L* you would get with LK printing at 100% and PK at 0%. So something is certainly off with either the profile or printer. Matte papers get in the range of L*15

 

[W. Fisher]

For wblackwell:

I referenced the first two blacks on the basICColor Catch 5.0 four pages of test images where they read about L*=20.0. They appear a couple of times on each page of four pages from the BC test scans page so I selected them rather than hunt for a blacker black or print a density step wedge. There are other blacker test areas on each BC test page that got down to around L*=8.5 on the PremierArt White Gloss Canvas (Same blacks for the glossy test too.), but the ones I referenced above are the same for both the HD-PK and the older PK inks. BasICColor's Catch 5 and dropRGB 2 has a much different layout than does X-rite on their test charts, and they include some black divider bars on some of them that must throw off the readings made in X-rite iProfiler software.

I suspect the i1 PhotoPro 2 head isn't playing well reading the coarse canvas surface as I did have to take a lot of successive scans at times to get a good reading: Usually the second return scan with the LED lamp, whereas the first scan with the tungsten/halogen went well - puzzling! From the comparison of the ink vs. the screen, I may not need to load the ink over 0% as the +5% was making some of the cyans a bit dark as well as the darker greens. I thought maybe spraying the surface might level it up a bit and give me a more accurate reading off the i1 head instead of scattering the two lights in it elsewhere.

So later, I did spray (Hahnemühle Spray) an overcoat on the 4 pages of BC test sheets and re-profiled them (Thank God BC Catch 5 software stores all earlier data for months!). I got a larger 2D gamut in ColorThink 3.0 and a bit better black dMax as well based off the sprayed test charts. I also made another larger test portrait off this new profile which looks good, but it's dark outside now to see if the slight green tint is in the black. Also I just sprayed it too. I'll check it tomorrow in bright sunlight to compare against it against the other print made with the older PK ink. Another day for that...

W.F.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

It all shows how much a game this is - with the inks, and the paper surface, the instrument and to come to a usable profile at the end. I mentioned above that I'm using the Lyson P600 photo black at this time and won't exclude that I may give this new Vermont ink a try when the current one is running out. I'm using a PE matte coated foil material - 24" - and on this one the L dropped from 16 to 12 with that ink which is a directly visible improvement with this new generation of ink.

 

[wblackwell]

I see. The 20.5 was actually a patch that was not full black in the file. Yes. The PK-HD ink is built very specifically to match the old PK in everything but the lowest dark values so having it match at the higher values is expected. We talk about it a bit in the press release. It actually took us almost half a year to make an ink that was backwards compatible with 95% of the tonal range that it was meant to make, and that also had a darker dMax. It was a very tricky balancing act and of course there are some very small compromises there. We don't want to just make ink for new printers. We want to make new ink for old printers as well. FYI, the ink is pure carbon and is an entirely different carbon than the previous PK so it will show a slight shift towards green if not re-profiled. All in all, it's an exceptional ink.

Best.
Walker