piezography

[Jos Stolck]

Hello, I am new here.

So this is my first threat.


I have a Epson 3000 and W1500. Have also access and take care of a 3800 of my photo club.

Installed a Piezography system on the 3000 for black/white prints. Bought at Injetmall.


I am learning to use that system with 7 neutral matte inks. Need 2 sets of refillable cartridges. One with the inks and the second for flush fluid. You need to flush a lot to remove the color ink before you can install the BW ink cartridges. And than you need to flush again to remove the flush fluid.

I had the intention to use the printer for both color and Piezography. But it is to mush work and waste to mush ink to do that. Thats why I bought the W1500 who was on sale for 249€ with Dye ink.


I use the quadtone rip driver for Piezography. My first BW prints where disappointing. Something was wrong. I printed a test sheet of all the inks and saw that the 7 cartridge delivered a yellow/grey tone. There still was some yellow ink present even after the extra flush. I contacted Jon Cone (from injetmall) and he explained me how to use the rip driver to print only one specific channel. So a was be able to print only the yellow channel until the yellow was gone.

Then a was able to make some prints and did that on matte Epson paper (profile was available in the rip). It was not bad but I expected more. A friend of me provided me some Hahnemuhle baryta paper. I liked this a lot more, but that can be a question of taste.


This is a Glossy paper and I printed with matte ink. But it is only the darkest K ink that is matte. As so little of the darkest ink is used a wonder if that can make a significant difference. There should also be a extra print with GO (gloss overprint) to finish a glossy print bud I did not installed such a cartridge. Used a spray.


I made an appointment with Jon Cone at Photokina. I provided him my prints to evaluate. He thought that there still was something wrong at first sight. Maybe a mis filled cartridge? He took my prints to look further in his office.


Later he informed me that there still was a strong yellow overcast. So I printed again a number of prints from the yellow channel till the overcast (who was there indeed) was completely gone.

My prints do look better now. I think about also installing a gloss ink and GO cartridge to complete the installation.


Does anybody has some experience with Piezography?

 

[soberprinter]

I experimented with the MIS Ultratone carbon inkset in my Epson 1400 several years ago. I was printing on Red River gloss and cotton "art" paper. The inkset had a black (kinda black), 2 warm and 2 cool inks along with the gloss optimizer. Definitely needed the G.O. on glossy papers. I used the same Quad Tone Rip as the driver.

Things that I found were.....I had to print at the 2880x2880 mode for satisfactory results. It was imperative to set up Quad Tone for matching light and dark inks and linearity with a color meter (a Spyderprint at the time). My calibrated eyeballs weren't good enough. It was very difficult to try to make prints look like a "wet" darkroom print. I had my best results on Red River Aurora Natural with a slightly warm tone shift.

It took a lot of experimenting (ie ink and paper) to get results that really pleased me. I do believe it's not an easy "replacement" for the "wet" look but a very doable methodology for producing wonderful prints. I'm sure if I had experimented with other B&W inksets (Baryta paper too), the "wet" look would have been achievable.

I now use a Windows port of Gutenprint RIP for most of my "color" printing. A variation of Gutenprint is the underlying code for Quad Tone RIP. It also has provisions for B&W inksets but it comes at the price of total manually adjusting of all parameters in RGB to CMYK printing...much more than Quad Tone RIP. It has really opened my eyes on what goes on in the canned printer profiles.

It's definately a journey, not a destination. I would experiment until you fully understand all the parameter adjustments and how they influence the printed outcome. A Colormunki or iPro would be highly recommended. Lots of time, ink and paper !

Maury

 

[martin0reg]

@Jos Stolck
Welcome to the forum and thank you for your report!

I have nothing really to contribute here but I am interested in a dedicated b&w ink set for long time... to reach the look and quality of wet darkroom b&w prints..
I once ordered a print sample from here:
http://shop.farbenwerk.com/schwarzweiss
..which looks quite good. But until now I was not willing to pay the price for such a set.
So I am practicing the poor man's b&w printing method with my pld R285:
http://dahmerphotography.blogspot.de/2009/11/how-to-get-high-quality-bw-prints-from.html

I would like to know how big you would estimate the advantage of your piezography R3000 over
- an epson with K3 ink set (for example the 3800 in your fotoclub)
- an epson with 6 channel dye ink set (your 1500) used in "black only" (see above)

BTW Here is an interesting thread about a self mixed b&w ink set for epson 6 channel (which i would like to try out - but haven't got the time yet):
http://www.printerknowledge.com/threads/making-a-b-w-ink-set-for-6-color-epson-printers.9198/