Pixiq

As an ancient citizen who grew up in the age of the black and white darkroom, and who worked, both at a pro lab, and in my own darkroom for a very long time, I tried to embrace inkjet printing as soon as possible.  Ah, there was the great potential for excellent black and white prints that could compare with black and white fiber prints.  My paper of choice (if I remember correctly) was Ilford Gallerie Graded paper.

Later, I got lazy and switched to Ilford Multigrade fiber.

But eventually, after using inkjets for cards and for tests while I kept my wet darkroom, the Epson 4800 arrived.  It had a built-in driver for b&w, and papers were beginning to appear that were especially made to resemble the Ilford Gallerie paper I had grown used to.  And so I switched to the digital darkroom and eventually bought the Epson 7800 and somehow squeezed it into my studio apartment.

Now to the point: the inkjet is going to be looked back on as a primitive piece of equipment.  It's primitive in the same way that the Space Shuttle is primitive: it is just way too complex.

The darkroom, even today when paper is exposed by lasers or LEDs but go through chemical baths is still much more reliable than inkjet printers.  They're just simpler. The Digital Silver Imaging solution is the best answer, and yes I have seen large prints that a friend has done through them on Ilford Fiber and they are perfect.  

For darkroom prints that normally require a lot of futzing (dodging, burning, bleach etc.) once you've got your digital file ready in Photoshop or your post-processing weapon of choice - you can get the best of both worlds at Digital Silver Imaging.  However - they need to make their profit just like anybody else that I would outsource a print to, and my web customers also want the best of both worlds: really good-looking prints at a price point that's under $200.  In other words, as much as I'd like to, I can't offer silver prints from my website without losing a good deal of money.  But I digress...

And printing processes that rely on "stamping" as opposed to "spraying" are also more reliable.

Think about what that high-end fine art printer is doing.  The drivers for talking to the printer are okay.  That's not the bottleneck.  The problem is that the technique depends on micro-spraying drops of pigment ink onto various types of paper, sometimes spraying as many as 1280 drops per inch, and these drops are coming from maybe eight different print heads.

And all that ink spritzing around.  It gets on the print head(s) and needs to be wiped off.  So something like a windshield wiper (though smaller) wipes off the excess and splashes it into a maintenance tank that is supposed to absorb the extra ink.

On top of all this, the combination of ink, mistakes, and high-grade paper actually is more, not less expensive than producing a darkroom fiber print (for materials).  However, if everything is working inkjet printing is less labor intensive - takes less time - and is more reproducible.

But given the complexity of what is being done when you print a large black and white print, there's more chance for something to go wrong.

Example: last week, an old enemy arrived on the Epson 7800 prints - a small amount of ink splatter on one edge of the print.  Didn't matter the size of the print - there it was.  Luckily, I have seen this before and suspected that the maintenance tank - the box that keeps the splattered extra ink - was messed up, although the Epson Driver indicators were - as NASA would say - Nominal.

Nevertheless, I pulled a dry maintenance tank from my 4800 printer (which I hadn't used for a while) and that maintenance tank had had a chance to dry out, and I exchanged it with the Epson 7800 print - and voila.  The very next 7800 print was perfect, and no more splatters since then (about two weeks ago).

On the other hand, the Epson 4800 which I hadn't used for a while had clogged nozzles and it took every trick in the world to clean them (not to mention all the wasted ink which is more valuable than gold bullion).

So with all the incredible software that has progressed like crazy - I use NIK software for most of my post processing - their still is a bottle neck and it is the inkjet fine art printer which I suspect will one day go the way of the shuttle.