So I'm curious as to how many of you have gotten into the more involved approaches of DIY printing for your clients... especially for B&W
By this, I'm talking about RIPs, B.O., or at the very least a nice K3 setup with fine art paper...
Now that I offer double-weight fiber silver prints, I've become increasingly dissatisfied with even high-end lab results for digital B&W prints.
Anyone have any thoughts? I'm specifically curious as to whether you've found your clients or potential clients notice a difference... or whether I'm just chasing a white whale of improvement that only a handful of nerds like myself will notice.
I stopped using labs, because I found, that the dynamic range was higher on my Canon 9500. I am selling prints on two kinds of paper - Ilford Pearl and Ilford Gold Fibre.
I show my customers som samples and 90% of them can see the difference and are willing to pay the extra price (10-15 %).
I naturally should drop the Pearl paper, but I think people like to have a choise.
Jonathan H wrote:
Can't comment on the R2880... but it's hard to compare anything digital to the lovely tactile joy of handling silver fiber prints
It's been way too long since I hovered over trays of dektol.
As someone who spent many years B&W printing, I miss those days not-one-bit.
I've not gone down the home printing route for a long time - the older Canon printers seemed to drink ink so I could never see them being economically viable, regardless of quality.
So what do you guys recommend for a decent printer and paper type? I've never gotten too technical about it because so far we've just done metallic prints from Millers & Mpix and it seems to work for our clients.
I'm using an Epson 2400 with a Lyson continuous ink system. The b&w's onto Lyson 300gsm fine art paper are really superb, and colour onto Ilford Gallerie Satin is also very good. It's nice to print to A3+, select an appropiate frame and sell it for £250+
I don't believe there is any easy, or global one answer for everybody with regard to doing your own printing.
For reference I have a Canon ipf5000, and (in my opinion, produce better prints than any lab I have worked with.) I am not slamming the labs, but I can spend more time tweaking the image, choosing the type of paper, and performing test prints as necessary to achieve the best quality, where the labs are limited as to how much time they can spend on any one order and still make a profit.
With a most of the current generation large format (you really need to get a printer with larger, 80 ml to over 100 ml minimum cartridges.) printers you should be able to get your costs down to a very reasonable level. Whether those costs will be less than the labs will depend on a large number of variables, but you should be able to get the costs down to a level where it is profitable to print your own.
Please note: I consider printing to be both an art, and a science, and there will be a learning curve.
If I were in the wedding business I think I would take a hard look at the HP large format printers with the gloss optimizer.
I seem to be pretty anal about printing... I just finished custom profiling 15 new papers for my epson 3800... I have a d65 home made desktop viewing booth and a bag of cotton gloves. Printing some test targets with both the custom profiles and the manufacturer's profiles... Like usual I will probably end up liking the custom profiles a lot better. But sometimes the manufacturer's profiles do pretty good.
Anyways... For me, Black and whites with the 3800 and the epson rip turn out really nice. I rarely have an issue with a color cast. Thought nothing beats a dedicated black and white printer.
i have an Epson 3800 and have been making all my large prints on it. I'm positive that I'm not the stickler that Evan is, but I have been very pleased. I've done some b/w dance performance prints on velvet fine art paper that have looked awesome-o.
