TECHNICAL SUPPORT

From the age of 14 I just had to take pictures and by the age of 16 I was so enchanted with Black and White printing, I began formulating developers for film and paper to increase tonal range and obtain luscious rich blacks. At that time we had a number of different papers, each with different characteristics. They were made by companies like Kodak, Agfa, Ilford, and Dupont. Photographers and Printers like myself had favorite papers and developers. You may ask, what does this have to do with digital printing? Lets examine that question.

In order to obtain pure Black and White prints several companies have created Quad Tone Black inks. Quad Tone inks basically means devoting a printer to only printing Black and White and the hue values of those inks sets the limitations. Epson, on the other hand, created a three black ink system, called K3. With 3 variations of black ink, Epson can rely more on black ink to produce better Black and White prints than they could with their Ultrachrome set of 1 light black. However, the use of color inks are still needed to neutralize the scale or tint the scale. If there are any slight anomalies in the gray scale there goes the perfect print. This can occur from a variety of reasons. There are slight variations from printer to printer which may not allow a canned profile to produce perfect results. There can be slight differences in paper coatings or even ink. Atmospheric pressure, temperature, and humidity can play a roll as well. You can usually see an anomalies in the Black and White Scale far more easily than in color values.

There has not been any profiling system or Rip software that can produce a perfect gray scale. I am not saying that you can not produce a good Black and White print, but there is nothing in the make up of Rips and Color Management software that can control the gray scale where the Lab Values for each step will read A=0 and B=0. This also means that ink sets that do not have Light Black and only have 6 color ink will probably produce very poor Black and White prints.

Another point regarding the New K3 system relates to the Epson 4000 offering dual blacks and the new K3 setup which only uses one black at a time. In order to change from one Black ink to another you must purge the existing ink and replace it with the other, which is costly and time consuming.

With all the attention placed on Black and White printing, we felt that there was a better way to approach the control of the gray scale.

Imagine, a software that could perfectly control the profile's gray scale whether using one black, two blacks or many blacks. Imagine each step of the scale perfectly neutralized. Imagine that the scale could be tinted to give you any variation of tone from Sepia to the characteristics of the famous photographic papers of yesterday. You could then setup the new 4800, 7800, 9800 just like the Epson 4000 with two blacks, Photo Black and Matte Black. You would not have to rely on multiple black inks to produce perfect Black and White prints. Imagine an Archival Highly Saturated ink set with absolutely no bronzing and with the most light fast inks. Imagine the possibilities.

That is what we accomplished with our Software Evolution Giclée and Symphonic Ultra Max Inks. The Rip can re-balance the profile's gray ramp to produce perfectly neutral gray values. Once this step is performed, you can dial in any color value to create delicate tints, Sepia Tones, or color values that can emulate photographic papers.

Ultra Max inks are made for 6, 7, 8, and 12 color printers with a color pallet of over 14 colors.

To understand our Inks go to www.americaninkjetsystems.com/symphonic_giclee_archival_inkje.html

To understand more about our Software go to Evolution Giclée.

Call us for further details.