It was this very thread, followed by the one I posted asking some questions about ImagePrint, that led me down the road of... Piezography.
Six weeks ago I was perfectly happy with ABW. Although I might have considered a piece of software (a la ImagePrint or QTR), I was adamant against using 3rd-party inks. I simply wasn't going to go there.
Well, there you go.
During the couple days while I waited for Cone's inks to arrive, I printed a number of recent images using ABW so that I would have a direct basis of comparison. I've got a spare set of Epson carts waiting in the printer stand, to get me back square, should that be indicated. Well, well.
I'll have more to say shortly, but the short answer, after making a 100+ prints with Cone's K7 Warm Neutral inkset, on a wide variety of both matte and glossy papers, is there is no question in my mind that Piezography holds a distinctive, consistent, qualitative advantage over ABW. That advantage is more pronounced in images that benefit from a long tonal range. And it becomes more profound as you go up in size.
You can easily achieve deep black, high-contrast images, if that's what you're after. You just have to edit for it. If you have a pixel that is mapped to tonal values of 1 or 2 or 3, you'll actually get detail from that pixel. Only zero will give you true black.
Same thing on the highlight end. Piezography's inks will differentiate the entire tonal scale. Most other printing systems, including Epson's ABW, can't do that.
That's the good news. The bad news is that the fidelity is so high that it will reveal every defect in your workflow. That calibrated monitor that seemed to soft-proof perfectly fine with ABW? Not so much anymore. If you can't see pretty much the entire Adobe 1998 gamut, you're flying blind. Making a print to see what's in that black-as-night shadow seems ass backwards. And it is.
Yes, you'll need that Eizo after all. And a GTI viewing station.
Like I said, I'll have more to say shortly...