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The Monochrome Issue - The Output Options - part 4 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

by Mile McNamee Published 01/04/2006

The Smooth Option - all the inks

Firstly you have to decide if you want the life of pigment ink or can accept the lower expectations of dye ink sets. This mainly affects metamerism. Assuming that you go for pigment you have to decide on the level of metamerism that you are prepared to put up with. More than 3, you can go to UltraChrome ink and the Epson 4000, 7600 or 2100 - but be quick, they are now discontinued for all practical purposes. If you want a Metameric Index of less than 3, you have to look at UltraChrome K3 ink (Epson 2400, 4800, 7800, etc) or maybe a Colorbyte's Imageprint RIP which can get UltraChrome below 1 with a bit of care.

Moving away from Epson (printer and ink) your options are many. If you wish to tone your prints at the printing stage (rather than in Photoshop) you have to move to Epson K3 UltraChrome, Permajet MonoChrome Pro, Lyson Quad Black, Lyson Small Gamut, or go abroad for the MIS UltraTone, Media Street Generations QuadBlack or Piezography Neutral K6 or K7 ink sets. All of these may be driven through the freeware, QuadToneRIP (www.quadtonerip.com). One of the interesting outcomes of our research at Focus was that all the suppliers were a little downbeat about multi-black - all felt that it would wither on the vine as the Espon K3 ink set was easily capable of doing the job.

This is not a view shared by the specialist monochrome groups but they tend to focus on method and effect, rather than earning a crust - there is a huge difference!

Once you have moved to pigmented inks you are almost committed to the use of fine art and matte papers. In the main, gloss and lustre papers do not accommodate pigment black without some flouriness and delicacy of surface. If you are using K3 Ultrachrome ink you have to choose between the all-surfaces-compatible PhotoBlack ink and the matte/fine art-only MatteBlack ink.

The penalty for using PhotoBlack K3 instead of MatteBlack is a small loss of Dmax. This is not a problem for commercial work but does bug the specialist monochrome printers. The inks may be switched in the Epson x800 series printers, but it wastes about £45 worth of ink. There is a solution called "Phatte Black", which is based around the Colorbyte RIP and replaces the K3 Light Light Black with a full black so that the x800 Epson series printer can have both Matte- and PhotoBlack resident on the same machine.

This strikes the writer as a bit of a dog's dinner solution. The Colorbyte RIP costs almost as much as an Epson 4800 so why not buy two printers!

The multi-black ink systems comprise sets of up to seven black and near-black inks - 'near' being lighter or coloured, usually both. They are typified by the MIS UltraTone which contains

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1st Published 01/04/2006
last update 09/12/2022 14:59:43

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