In yet another apparently necessary digital acquisition, I today took delivery of an Epson 4000 printer. It’s a huge beast that is triple the size of any other device in my workspace. I cleared off the assistant’s desk for it to live on. Judging from the complex chatter that emits from it, I think it might be sentient.
Ryan Harrington from JVH Technical in Bellevue set it up for me. The last printer he delivered in the neighborhood was to Jock Sturges, who apparently lives about 3 blocks away. We haven’t met, though I do have a story about a joint exhibit we almost had together. Having Ryan here meant I had someone to walk me through the troubleshooting when I could not produce a print without banding, no matter how many head alignments and nozzle cleaning cycles we went through. Also, if you look closely you can see the imprint of the daisy wheels that propel the print through the printer. Finally, I solved the problem by printing uni-directionally. Still, it seems a printer of this capability should not be exhibiting problems like that out of the box.
The profiles that come with the printer are not good enough, I have to say. There is some sharp drop-offs in the midtones on Epson Glossy, and the shadow depth is not there. But a black and white print was amazingly close, with no adjustments. Then I downloaded Quadtone RIP, and ran a print using the defaults. There was no comparison. The Epson driver showed a slight magenta cast in the midtones, but the QTR print was dead on. I’ve been spending the afternoon tweaking away trying all the adjustments in trying to mimic a silver print.
Which I could not (and I hope no one can) do in an afternoon. There’s something in the middle zones of a silver print that is unmistakable, something to do with brightness and presence and density, that is very difficult to match in pigment. I met Paul Butzi at the Poncho auction last week, who had two marvelous b/w digital prints next to mine, who said the problem with QTR is that it is a monochromatic output, but a silver print has many colors in different density areas. Careful tweaking using a full RGB output is the only way to create black and white with presence. I’m such a long way from there.
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