I think Sandy's summary is pretty good. I would throw in one more factor about the QTR approach that I just stumbled on: it may be possible because of the individual control of each ink to minimize the infamous 'roller blind defect' (or banding) that seems to pop up on these printers after a few years. I have a four year old 2200 that was starting to show a little of this problem with the green negatives. But by using a custom QTR profile I was able to use mostly black and light black inks with some other helper colors and get a nice smooth negative again. But as Sandy mentioned, the learning curve on QTR is not for the faint-of-heart. But it is an ideal system to take someone else's hard work and just drop their curve into your system. :^)

Just to supplement Sandy's comment about the 3800 w/Epson drivers (the approach I am using)... I do apply a correction curve to linearize the output, but the curve I derived is very "gentle" compared to many curves I've used previously (Burkholder/Schreiber) and curves students have brought to workshops using other methods such as PDN.

I do plan to pursue the QTR approach, but what I'm doing now is working so well in terms of print quality and tonal smooooooothness, I'm taking the approach to not fix something that ain't broken.

3. HP 9180 and print in either composite black or in color with PDN.

Sandy King

Sandy, was curious about the composite black method- is this the same as desaturating in RGB mode and printing in color? Thanks.

Sandy, was curious about the composite black method- is this the same as desaturating in RGB mode and printing in color? Thanks.


Yes.

Sandy

About the Epson R1800,

Would it not be possible to get really high UV densities with the "usual" metod, i.e. colorized negs? Or is the Ultrachrome HiGloss inkset substandard to the K3 inkset, in terms of UV density.

And: the new Epson R1900 has an orange ink. It might be very good for UV blocking, am I right?

Thanks!