U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | Re: venetian blinds, Epson 1280 and other printers

Re: venetian blinds, Epson 1280 and other printers



Clay,

Some of the Epson Printer/Driver combinations are known to print with this strange reversal in the highest density steps..... regardless of what color you use including black and white.  Some colors seem to reduce the effect.  I found this same problem on the R2400 even, but found it more pronounced on an Epson 7800 when I was working with a student in San Francisco—she had just uncrated it when I arrived.

Best Wishes,
Mark Nelson

Precision Digital Negatives - The System
PDNPrint Forum at Yahoo Groups
www.MarkINelsonPhoto.com


In a message dated 3/3/07 9:57:18 PM, wcharmon@wt.net writes:



The straight-ahead PDN system does some extremely strange things when you use the standard Epson driver and colorize the negative. For instance, the spectral tests I ran indicated that a Red 200, Green 25 blend would be ideal for palladium. Using the PDN test tablet, here are the UV densities for the first couple of highlight steps:




Step 100:  2.03 logD UV

Step 93:  2.07

Step 91: 2.6 !!

Step 90: 2.85!!

Step 89: 3.17

Step 88: 3.24

Step 87: 3.52!!

Step 85: 2.93

Step 84: 2.68




Now this is just plain weird. 




Visually, the steps appear to be getting less dense as you move down to lower step numbers. But my UV densitometer tells another tale. And I confirmed this by printing the negative again AND deliberately overprinting the step tablet by a stop  to see if I could even get any tone in those strange steps in the middle. It tells the same story. So a correction curve using this PDN color would be very difficult if not impossible to make with these density reversals in a gradated step wedge what in theory is the same tone. 




More later.




Clay
















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