Re: Digital negatives for gum printing

[Judy Seigel <jseigel@panix.com>]

On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Katharine Thayer wrote:
> ... A gum printer
> who uses printing halftones to make his gum prints told me once that he
> does that in part because gum works best laid down in discrete dots
> rather than continuously. He claimed that the discrete gum-bits created
> by halftones stay attached to the paper in development, whereas with a
> continuous-tone negative, insoluble gum will be dragged away with the
> soluble gum next to it as the soluble gum dissolves away in development,
> making the edges of tonal areas indistinct. I thought it egregious
> nonsense at the time (considering some of the quite sharp one-coat
> historical gum prints which used, I would assume, continuous-tone
> negatives) but it's an interesting question.

In my experience he is right. The first time I printed a negative in half
tone dots that someone from the list had sent me, it was a revelation: You
could almost do no wrong in exposure. If you look at Kodak's diagram of
its halftone dot from its vaunted dedicated film (2000 something or other)
it suggests why -- the dot really is ON or OFF with straight sides. I
think they call it a hard dot -- no need to worry about delicate
highlights sliding off.

However, this advantage seems NOT to reside in the inkjet stochastic dot
-- it pixilates and flakes in a way the halftone (round regular) dot
doesn't.

So maybe someone who ONLY wants a printer for negatives should get an
oversize laser printer with high resolution?  Then again, they cost about
4 times as much and may not go larger than 11x17 inches.

Judy