Life beyond the hard drive - fine art papers ?

[Godfrey]

Godfrey and mfogiel,

thanks a lot for your input. You are both absolutely right, getting my own printer and start printing myself would be ideal.
But I am absolutely sure that this is NOT what I personally want to do, as I have clogged up print heads already on a regular basis with my "office" printers at home. This will be an issue even more so, in case I would get a dedicated B&W printer. I am just not printing enough on a regular basis to keep the ink flowing.

So, nope I am not gonna go down that slippery slope .

It doesn't keep much to keep one of the Epson printers unclogged. I make it a habit to print one color photo a week, usually to an 8.5x11 paper. Only time I've had a clog was when I had been away from the printer for six or eight months, and that time it just took a*fresh ink cart and a few cleaning cycles to clear the nozzles perfectly.

Pigment inks are particles of pigment, coated and in a carrier fluid, so the nozzles are much larger diameter than the dye-based inks of most office printers. Thus they don't tend to clog anywhere near as easily.

BUT, if you're determined not to do your own printing, you are still going to have to print a lot to learn how to get the best results. You still need to calibrate and profile your display. You still need to configure your image processing applications. You still need to learn how the ink and paper interact so that you know what to do in rendering your photographs. You ALSO need to establish a relationship with a service bureau to learn how they work, learn how to apply their profiles, what format print file works best for them, etc. To me, the cost of a printer is trivial compared to the cost of learning how to work with a service bureau.

If you're going to print so infrequently that you won't be doing that, the best thing to do is to find a service bureau that produces prints the way you like and give up being overly critical of what you get back.

G

 

[icebear]

...

If you're going to print so infrequently that you won't be doing that, the best thing to do is to find a service bureau that produces prints the way you like and give up being overly critical of what you get back.

G

This is why I stopped B&W film shooting after I did not have access anymore to a wet darkroom doing film development and printing myself. So I see trouble ahead :bang:.
But I hope they will be up to the challenge having me as a customer .

But on the other hand, the level of control I do have in LR with a histogram is way beyond what I could ever have achieved myself in wet printing using MG RC IV.

 

[mfogiel]

"So, nope I am not gonna go down that slippery slope ."

If your paradigm is: small quantity, big quality, simply look up a professional lab, which is going to give you lot's of options. Speaking about B&W - in Europe, there are some labs like Picto (Paris), that let you download their profile for soft proofing ( so that when you "soft print" your image on a calibrated computer screen, the result should match the final print), you send them the files over the net, and they actually produce a BARYTA PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT out of it and mail it to you ( if you pay, obviously). This would be the perfect marriage of computer editing and chemical printing. Just look around the web for a pro lab in the US that will do the same.
On a side note, I still think, that you should shoot silver film and develop it yourself. This, plus scanning personally will give you a lot more control and will justify spending money on good prints. It only takes a black bag and a sink to do it, you do not need a darkroom.
Final comment: I strongly advise you to do some math before you decide something - Epson printers are really very reliable these days, and you can easily count on 5 year's service. Just google around the net to see what the average printing costs are per print of the size you desire, and factor in some waste, so let's say multiply your expected next 5 year's printing output by 2, plus include the printer cost, and then divide the sum by the amount of images. Then compare all that to the cost of the same amount of images printed by a pro lab, and see what comes out cheaper.

 

[icebear]

Thanks for your input, mfogiel.
I did the math and provided that the store and person I intend to start having some of my photos printed, will not screw it up completely, it will be much more economic to go this route. Less than $30 for a 13x19 inch on Canson Baryta Photo Rag sounds like a bargain.

There are professional labs also offering just print w/o adjustments or with professional adjustments/fine tuning. Consequently there is a huge price difference. "Digital Silver Imaging" (US) is doing digital output on real photo paper. "WhiteWall" (UK) is offering special Baryta prints for MM owners. All this comes at a hefty price for the top quality. Compared to this, getting a printer myself would be much cheaper. I guess 4 or 5 pro lab prints would equal the price of the printer (e.g. Epson 3800) or a set of ink.

From a little less of a year using the MM, I got let's say about 10 photos that I would like to see as a print to put into a portfolio. If some of them work well, I would print them as big as the IQ allows and hang them on a wall. So it does not make any sense for less than 20 prints a year to have an own printer.

 

[Piezography Goddess]

Thanks for the warm welcome icebear! Yes, I have been directly involved in Piezography since day one, including development and support over the years. I am just getting started here, so please point out any threads you'd like me to check out, otherwise I am searching for keywords to find threads that may benefit from my input. I plan to have a helpful presence in this and other forums, focusing on inkjet printing and all that it involves including papers, inks, printers, printer maintenance, etc... I have gained a wealth of knowledge over many years of experience, that I want to share and use to help others.

 

[icebear]

Hello Dana,

thanks for contributing professional knowledge to our forum. I think this will be highly appreciated.
As with any online forum there might be some "know-it-alls" with pretty opinionated posts. Don't be put off when this happens.