I first came across the work of Jon Cone when he was making inks for Iris printers in the 1990s, although $150,000 price tag put me off using the system that he developed towards the end of that decade as ‘Digital Platinum’. When in 2000 he came out with his Piezography®BW software and inks for cheap desktop EPSON printers I immediately imported it from the USA and used it with an Epson 1160 fitted out with a continous inking system.
Prior to using it, I’d been reasonably happy with the colour prints I could make from this and other Epson printers using Epson’s own inks, but hadn’t felt that the black and white results were suitable for anything other than quick proofs. Piezography was different, and I was (and still am) stunned by the subtlety of the results. In the 1980s and 90s I had worked with various methods of hand-coating to make photographic prints on watercolour papers, including kallitype, palladium and platinum prints. Now I could get the same qualities as these more or less at the push of a button, with perhaps just a little more richness and depth if I used some of the more expensive coated papers such Hahnemuhle’s German Etching (and later, Photorag.)
I was lucky to have few problems with Piezography inks, while some other users had frequent blockages of the printer heads. I’d recouped some of the costs by reviewing the system for the British Journal of Photography, so felt a little remorse when those who had taken up the inks on my recommendation had problems. Some were caused by a failure to properly close down the Epson printers, but I think there was also something of a matter of luck with Epson quality control. Good Epson printers parked their heads so they were sealed off, but Friday afternoon models didn’t and I think Epson had more than its share of Fridays.
The 1160 was a four ink printer, and Piezography replaced the cyan, magenta, yellow and black with a black and three shades of grey, as well as supplying a much improved printer driver (a Photoshop plugin) for black and white printing which used those grey tones to eliminate any visible “dottiness” in the prints, and I think improve detail. For ultimate results I think you needed to produce files at 720 dpi, while there was no point in going above 36o dpi with the normal Epson driver.
A couple of years later, Jon Cone produced some improved inks under the name Piezotone, and these were available in different grey tones. I went over to using the ‘warm neutral’ set, and when Cone was beta testing these for use with the Epson driver rather than proprietary software I was one of the beta testers. So prints made with my printer were pretty good, as the profiles had been fine-tuned to work with it. Again some other users, thanks to Epson manufacturing tolerances, had slightly less good results.
Having been designed for my printer, the four ink Piezotones worked so well that I lost interest in the various improved systems being developed by Cone. Incredible though the K7 inks were, they would not work in my 4-ink hardware, and the gain in print quality seemed relatively small.
All my inkjet prints were matt, and I was quite happy with them. They had a quality that could not be matched on matt silver gelatin papers, which always had an inherent dullness to them, and matched that of the best non-silver prints (except for some carbon prints) but I still sometimes went into the darkroom when I wanted the different look of air-dried glossy silver gelatin, although once framed behind glass there was relatively little difference.
The next big change came with new fibre inkjet papers that promised to match fibre based glossy silver papers. Again I started printing on them with colour inks, using an Epson 2400, with great results. Epson’s Ultrachrome K3 inks include 2 grays and a black, and can also produce pretty good black and white images using Epson’s own ABW (Advanced Black and White) option, which also adds a little coloured ink to make the tones neutral (or cool or warm as required.) ABW isn’t perfect, but usually produces better prints than I can in the darkroom, although some find their slight change in tone under different light a problem.
I’ve also tried printing with the K3 inks without the colour inks using the Bowhaus RIP – and you can also do this with other RIPs including the Quad Tone RIP (QTR.) Unfortunately this gives a slightly unattractive tone to the prints.
To get significantly better b/w prints (others have described those made using ABW as subtle and dramatic) I think I would need to invest in new hardware, at least if I want to keep the ability to make both black and white and colour prints, as 4 ink systems such as my two 1160s are no longer supported. The Piezotone inks I’m still very occasionally using (and are working long after their best-before date) are being discontinued in March 2012.
More interesting than my own experiences is Jon Cone’s The State of the State of the Arts in Black & White, in which he tells the story of his various ink developments, including the “esoteric state of the art” system that he developed for Gregory Colbert‘s ‘Ashes and Diamonds‘ show, seen by more than ten million people. The giant (8.5 x 14 ft) prints were produced by “a complex monochromatic methodology with twelve inks” using a Roland printer on Japanese hand-made paper sheets and each took 18 hours to print. Although this system isn’t one that could be marketed commercially, Cone used it as the starting point for his ‘Special Edition’ inks.
Even if you are not particularly interested in setting up to make your own fine black and white prints, the article is well worth reading for the insight that it does give into the work of some of those who have mastered digital printing, along with examples of their work. It comes too on a new website, ‘The Agnostic Print’ which has a number of other articles that look as if they will keep me busy reading for some time.