Cone PiezographyBW

[Nick Makris <nick@mcn.org>]

Re: Cone PiezographyBWHello again,

Over the last few months I have been struggling with refining (finalizing,
HA!) output to my printer.  One method I have tinkered with is the transfer
function - that function is disabled with the PiezographyBW plugin (I'm
pretty sure of that statement).  As some of you may recall, I have been
testing the Piezography system, with which I am not having a good time; in
fact my black Piezography cartridge has stopped functioning (I haven't used
it for more than a few calibration prints) and I havn't gotten any help from
Cone and company so I'm not a happy camper at the moment.  I'm not ready to
spend big bucks on inks from Cone until I find that they do what I hope they
will do.

Pending a resolution of that, I have been surfing around looking for
anything pertinant to resolving this printer dilemma - mind you I recently
purchased two 1160 printers for this process (one for bw and one for color).
I happened to stumble on some info that might solve some of the problems
that have been disucssed on the list and if it works, solve the cost of ink
problem.  MIS now has some inks that will act as a replacement for the very
expensive Inkjet Mall/Cone products. See
http://www.inksupply.com/index.cfm?source=html/quadinks_new.html - the older
stuff is referred to as "MIS ORIGINAL QUADTONE INKSETS - For use with Chris
Brandin and Carl Corey workflows" and the new inks are "MIS FULL SPECTRUM
QUADTONE INKSETS - for use with John Woolf workflow".  Be sure to check out
the relative workflows as they describe the process and provides the curves.
I contacted John Woolf and he replied as follows:

>The MIS Full Spectrum Inks will work virtually identically to the Piezo
Inks
>with the Piezopgraphy BW driver.  However, you may want to try my
>technique, using my curve with the Epson driver, as a starting point.
>I think it produces a slightly better black and less microbanding than
>the Piezo driver.

>The original MIS Quad inkset is completely different from the
>Full Spectrum Inks.  They should not be confused.
>They produce very different results.

The cost of the Cone inks is $260 VS $52 for 4-4OZ bottles - I sure hope
they do the trick.

Some of you have received a document from me regarding how I process my
scans and digital negs, I hope to update it to include the above including
the grayscale image curve that I understand may be necessary to tweek the
final result.  More to follow.

Many thanks for listening,

Nick