Interview with Henry Wilhelm

[John.Murray]

Excellent!

(Where did you get those chairs?)

[laughingbear]

Yup, thanks for that Michael!

<....downloading aiff's via dial up, shaking head in disbelief. Why am I living here?>  

[NikoJorj]

The French word 'giclee' is not used by French photographers and print professionals, and never will be.  Pardon me for being indelicate, but the secondary, slang definition is sexual ejaculation.

I 100% agree with the first sentence, and wouldn't bet that much money on the fact that IRIS printers were known of photographers in France before they were history... People simple say "jet d'encre" for inkjet printing, period.
But it may just show that if something is way WAY coooool, you have to say it in french         .

About the slang definition, it's not something evident to a francophone reader - it rather reminds me of a carburetor (the jet is called "gicleur").


But we're way off topic now - I'd also thank Luminous Landscape to make this big piece of very valuable information available!

[Paul Roark]

Regarding B&W carbon printing, I was particularly pleased that Mr. Wilhelm recognized the significance of printing monochrome (black and white) images with non-fading carbon.  See audio segment 11, "Papers & Inks" at 5 min., 50 sec. into the interview segment.  As something of a purist B&W printer, I've taken this to what I see as the next logical step, which is getting all the color pigments out of the image.  Epson "Advanced B&W" mode on their K3 printers still contains significant amounts of color.  See high resolution scan at http://www.paulroark.com/BW-Info/R1800-Lightfastness.pdf  I think B&W purists will appreciate the various workflows many of us now use that are 100% carbon.

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com

[Schewe]

Epson "Advanced B&W" mode on their K3 printers still contains significant amounts of color.

Define "significant"...if you mean ANY, yes, ABW does use a small amount of color ink (depending on whether you are using the color toning).

At neutral, I'm pretty sure the warmth of the K inks only require a tiny bit of cyan to cool them down, no magenta & yellow. So, I wouldn't call that "significant". The K inks are indeed based on carbon pigment and Henry's own tests show up to 300 years (depending on paper) for the ABW mode printing. That's long enough for me...

[MHMG]

Define "significant"...if you mean ANY, yes, ABW does use a small amount of color ink (depending on whether you are using the color toning).

At neutral, I'm pretty sure the warmth of the K inks only require a tiny bit of cyan to cool them down, no magenta & yellow. So, I wouldn't call that "significant". The K inks are indeed based on carbon pigment and Henry's own tests show up to 300 years (depending on paper) for the ABW mode printing. That's long enough for me...

Those 200+ year ratings for ABW mode are still based on the consumer-oriented light fade criteria set for color photos. As such, the allowable densitometric gray balance changes roughly translate to colorimetric shifts of about delta E=6 to 9 (note that density and colorimetry are not strictly commutable properties). Total changes in print density of typically 30% are also allowed when color shift isn't the limiting factor.  Artists and museum curators, especially when working with monochromatic images having aesthetic beauty highly dependant on subtle color and tonality, should not be counting on such high display life predictions or take the comparative differences too much at face value.  Fading non linearity in these systems is underrated and underreported with consumer-toleranced test criteria.

B&W printmakers do have legitimate reasons to pursue printmaking processes that maximize the carbon pigment and remove as much colored pigments as possible. I would  consider "significance" as any individual ink or blend of inks that has enough weaker pigmentation in it or deploys the additional colorant non-uniformly over the full tonal scale in such a manner as to cause noticeable hue shift over time. It takes relatively low amounts of less stable colorant for this situation to occur.  One aspect of inkjet printing where third party solutions may indeed be superior to the OEM inks is in the use of dedicated monochrome ink sets, but very little standardized industry testing has been done on any third party pigmented inks to support any claims up or down at this point in time.

My own sense is that the dedicated monochrome ink sets like Paul described are definitely worth pursuing for artists seeking the most permanent B&W prints. It also seems perfectly reasonable to dedicate a printer to a monochrome set-up, perhaps one's previous generation model, when it comes time to upgrade.

Best regards,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com

[Paul Roark]

Define "significant"...

At neutral, I'm pretty sure the warmth of the K inks only require a tiny bit of cyan to cool them down, no magenta & yellow. ...

Even at "neutral," ABW uses all the colors.  Just look at the 1600 dpi scan at page 1 of http://www.paulroark.com/BW-Info/R1800-Lightfastness.pdf  You can easily verify this by doing your own high resolution scans.  In the dark areas you can't see this very easily, so look at the light areas.  The scan I posted is of a plain 5% test patch printed with a 4800 using "ABW" mode set to neutral.

The reality is that all of the OEM systems are competiting first and foremost for the huge color market.  B&W is an easy add-on because even for color images they need the carbon "core" for good low gamut image content.  So, they have 3 carbon positions in their inksets.  The carbon most manufacturers use is very warm, so they do need to add some color for a neutral B&W.  But they add much more than the minumum needed for a neutral tone.  They presumeably are doing this to get more smoothness.

For the best B&W we'd ideally like all of the ink positions to be 100% carbon, and of whatever tone we are trying to achieve.  As it turns out, with at least some types of carbon pigments and clear base for dilutant, we can achieve a fairly good range of tones just by selecting different papers.

So, I'm trying to push the envelope of B&W carbon digital printing by coming up with, among other things, ways to make 100% carbon inksets that achieve the tones B&W printers will want to use.  Hopefully the large OEM sellers will find a neutral carbon core to be in their interest also, so that we'll have more competing sources of carbon pigments.  

My experience indicates once we can buy good carbon, we can make dilution bases that work very well to make inksets of whatever densities we like.  That is, if a B&W enthusiast is interested, custom, home-mixed, 100% carbon inksets are a reality, and they can lower the cost of inks to the point that cost virtually drops out of the equation.  See, for example, http://www.paulroark.com/BW-Info/Ink-Mixing.pdf  I've had a 2200 runing an inkset composed of carbon diluted with nothing but water, glycerol, and Photo Flo, and it's worked very well indeed for about 8 months so far.  I outline the 100% carbon inkset approaches I've tried and am using at http://www.paulroark.com/BW-Info/

Clearly most will simply use the OEM solutions, and they are getting quite good.   But, as has always been the case in B&W, there will be a number of alternative approaches to the medium.  100% carbon, for its extreme stability and other advantages, is the option I and a number of others are pursuing, and it's working very well.  B&W has always been a medium that could be not only very affordable, but also subject to lots of experimentation and individual, custom approaches.  From what I can tell, these characteristics will continue into this digital age.  

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com

[JimGoshorn]

Thanks Michael for posting that very interesting interview!

Things I found interesting:

While Wilhelm suggests using non-OBA papers, the OBA papers frequently have some of the highest permanence ratings. For instance, in his ratings for the Hahnemuhle papers, Fine Art Pearl which has the most OBAs of the rated papers has the best rating.

Even though Hahnemuhle has an excellent reputation, the papers that were rated had lower ratings than Epson papers.

When the Harman papers were rated with Epson, HP and Canon ink sets, HP was best followed by Canon and Epson was least permanent.