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March 2006
David Em davidem@earthlink.net
www.davidem.com
Copyright 2006 David Em.
It's generally acknowledged that color digital photography's come of age. Affordable high-quality cameras and printers coupled with Adobe's (http://www.adobe.com) Photoshop add up to a digital darkroom that far surpasses the expensive and finicky wet chemistry systems of yore. Except when it comes to black and white photography.
Producing a satisfying monochrome digital print turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Epson (http://www.epson.com), Hewlett-Packard (http://www.hp.com), and Canon (http://www.usa.canon.com) have taken up the black and white printing challenge with a vengeance.
With all the good cheap color printers on the market, who needs black and white in the first place? The answer is nearly everybody. Besides the marvelous inherent aesthetic of black and white film, many professional and amateur photographers have developed a deep affinity for it because, unlike color film, they can develop it in their own darkrooms.
In fact, so many people love black and white that Kodak developed a new black and white film to satisfy the market at a time when most film development's come to a grinding halt.
Another constituency is members of the scientific and medical communities, who require extremely fine monochromatic tonal ranges (Eizo (http://www.eizo.com) makes a stunning ultrasharp LCD for this crowd). And then there's a couple billion people who want to scan, retouch, and archivally reprint prized photographs of their great-great grandparents.
For several years, printer manufacturers have been selling inexpensive color inkjet printers that produce remarkably good results using dye-based inks. Unfortunately, most dye-based inks don't last terribly long when exposed to light, making them less than ideal for exhibiting pictures on a wall or handing them down to your children (by contrast, all those old prints of great-grandma and pa in the old country have held up remarkably well).
The solution to this problem is pigments. Pigments offer long life, but are much more difficult to formulate for inkjet printers than dyes. Epson took the bull by the horns six years ago with their 2000P, a desktop printer that produced color and monochrome prints that last up to a hundred years.
The 2000P had many good qualities, but its black and white prints suffered from something called metamerism. Metamerism is a phenomenon where different lighting conditions cause what should be a neutral gray tone to noticeably shift color. The 2000P's prints tended to skew towards a ghastly green under some light sources. Other ink-system and light combinations produce violet or purplish castes. It's not a pretty sight.
Epson made a second pass at pigment printing a couple years later with their Ultrachrome ink set that delivered a much wider color gamut than the 2000P's inks. Black and white printing was greatly improved as well, but it was still less than perfect. Because it's not possible, at least so far, to produce a full range of monochrome densities with a single black ink with an inkjet printer, the intermediate tonal ranges are simulated with the help of other colors such as light cyan and light magenta. The resulting "painted" gray is less subject to metamerism.
To fill the vacuum in the marketplace, Jon Cone (http://www.piezography.com/) developed a process called Piezography that uses three inks in addition to black to produce a range of grays. A similar system was developed by Lyson (http://www.lyson.com/) inks. These arrangements require a printer (only certain printers are certified to work) to be flushed and loaded with the new inks. The results are excellent, however there are the downsides that A) you have to own a separate printer for printing in black and white, and B) that printer immediately goes out of warranty the minute you load it with third party inks.
A couple years ago, Hewlett-Packard took a crack at producing completely neutral tone prints with a dye-based ink set that used an additional gray ink and no "painting." I tested it in their gigantic 130nr desktop that produces 24-inch wide prints rated to last between fifty and a hundred years. The prints were indeed neutral, but they also lacked a certain punch.
About nine months ago, Epson replaced the Ultrachrome colors with its third generation of pigmented inks called K3. The K3 inks use two grays in addition to black. They also use quite a bit of light cyan and light magenta and trace amounts of cyan, magenta, and yellow to produce a nearly perfect neutral tone. Surprisingly, I wasn't able to see these additional colors when I looked at the prints through an optical magnification loupe.
I have to say I'm very impresses with the K3 inks' monochrome capabilities. The tonal range is wide and the blacks are deep. I tested them on Epson's Premium Gloss and Luster papers that mimic traditional photographic media and on their Velvet Fine Art matte paper, with very impressive results.
Epson's K3 ink printers, range from their $800 13-inch desktop "prosumer" R2400 model on up to the $5000 44-inch 9800. They are all solid machines, but they have a significant design flaw. Gloss papers use a Photo Black cartridge while matte papers require a Matte Black cartridge. That's not a problem per se, but for reasons understood only by Epson, both cartridges don't fit in any of the machines at the same time, requiring users to swap out one for the other.
This is more than an inconvenience. Every time you switch cartridges, a significant amount of all the inks is lost when the system recalibrates. While I was doing my tests on the R2400, I could practically watch the ink levels in the software utility go down in front of my eyes. If you're not switching blacks, a 13" x 19" print should run between two and three bucks in ink cost, which is very good for a print that can last a hundred years or more.
Epson has had the high end photography and fine art digital printing business almost to itself for years. As a result, they practically own the mindshare of this community, as Apple does on the computing side. That may be about to change.
At the PMA (Photography Marketing Association) show in Orlando last month, Hewlett-Packard and Canon both announced printers that are directly competitive with Epson's offerings. Enough good digital cameras have been sold that a market segment now exists that's willing to pay good money for a printer that delivers both lush color and truly neutral monochrome prints.
HP's new $699 PhotoSmart Pro B9180 and Canon's $1,945 imagePROGRAF iPF5000 are both due this summer. Both use pigmented inks. Neither requires you to switch Photo and Matte Black cartridges and suffer the attendant ink loss. On matte paper, the B9180 uses the Matte Black for true black and the Photo Black, which is not as dense, to create Dark Gray, which it supplements with a Light Gray. You can choose to print with either Gray/Black only, or with a "painted" gray augmented by other colors. I haven't seen samples B9180 prints yet, but HP represents that its new Vivera pigment inks virtually nullify the effects of metamerism.
I'm looking forward to testing the Canon iPF5000. In addition to black and white printing capabilities, its Lucia ink set features no less than twelve colors, including a true Red, Blue, and Green, colors that must be mixed in the other printers (for example, yellow and magenta are mixed to produce red).
Wet chemistry photography purists may feel that digital black and white photographs (or color, for that matter) will never equal the quality of traditional prints. Maybe there are differences, but if there are, I judge them to be pretty miniscule at this point. In my opinion, digital prints are now technically as good as any print ever made.
What's important to remember is that great prints don't come about simply by hitting the Print button. Every print that stands the test of time is a manifestation of somebody's vision that incorporates subject matter, composition, contrast, and all the other conceptual and formal elements that go into a work of art. Everything else is just quibbling.