High standard solutions

We offer several solutions that all produce a very high standard black & white inkjet print, but do them differently. We are able to surpass what EPSON® can do with their own printers with our B&W solutions.

When I say "high standard" I simply mean an inkjet print which is equivalent or better than a darkroom print. A bold statement to be sure, but one that is backed by the standard of work that I have been producing for photographers in my own studio since 1980, and to which thousands of customers of my systems can attest. Better? In what ways? Silver gelatin paper has a rather narrow dynamic range. Yes it can achieve a very dark dMax and a potentially bright dMin (depending upon the brightness of the paper), but the range of tone on both the highlights and shadows is restricted by how silver reacts with light and the development process: shadows lack detail and highlights tend to become blown out. My system delivers linearized tone from dMax to dMin, and that is to say that the shadows and highlights have measurably more tonal latitude than conventional silver print. If you have seen platinum prints with their unusually wide latitude of tone (albeit weak shadows and highlights) - think of my solution as a platinum print with the addition of endless shadow and highlight information! It is the equivalent of getting the additional stops out of film, that silver paper can simply not deliver.

The high standard which I speak about is similar to the same continuous tone that silver renders. Even though inkjet printers deliver dots of ink to the paper, my systems do so at such a high frequency that the dots can not be seen by the eye and rarely by strong magnification. It has been the secret of my processes since the first quad black system I developed for IRIS Graphics printers in the mid-1990s. A simple explanation is to dilute an ink's strength and print it at a higher frequency of dither patterns. Patterns which are so close together that they appear as solid tones, rather than half-tones or dither patterns that the OEM must produce with their own printer driver.

The color of black and white

The final standard to think about when considering a digital equivalence of a historical medium is aesthetics and longevity. This is where my PiezoTone and Piezography inks are known for producing the highest standard. Over the years I have been able to increase longevity to the point where Piezography inks and PiezoTone inks with Museum Black option simply do not have fade which a human can detect (<5%). This is quite the antithesis to the standards employed by EPSON (using Wilhelm or RIT) which use a 35% fade rate as their standard for longevity ratings. Their inks guarantee fade with a standard that results in a loss of 35% of the density of a print. Our inks have been engineered so that they will not fade to any human visually measurable degree. Also, we are able to keep color shift to less than DeltaE of 2, also below the human threshold.

The aesthetic engineering of PiezoTone and Piezography inks takes into account historical references to monochromatic color that photographers are used to seeing in traditional prints. It is done with particle size, shape, and pigment selection. It is not enough to use light-fast carbon pigments. We see color by the light absorbed and reflected back to the human visual system. Is it possible to portray depth via a thin layer of pigment on paper? My inks are successful in portraying depth associated with fine silver printing, by employing an expensive manufacturing process of careful cutting and shaping of each pigment particle. A marvel in engineering when one realizes that the narrow distribution of particle sizes is measured in nanometers.

The solutions which I am currently offering are Piezography K6/K7, PiezographyBW ICC, iQuads,
and PiezoTone inks with the StudioPrint RIP.