Best gamut ink for fine art giclee
Best gamut ink for fine art giclee
- Subject: Best gamut ink for fine art giclee
- From: Dave Leach <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 11:59:34 -0600
Lee Blevins wrote:
What is the best ink for giclee?
I'm interested in an Epson but how is their pigmented ink?
The HP UV is not a very good gamut.
Is the epson better?
We are a photography studio and digital retouching house in Chicago
and we use fine art prints as handouts
to promote our wares.
We have a variety of Epson printers (1280 & 5000 with dye inks, and
4000 & 7600 w/UC) and I have
experimented with many different settings and papers to obtain the
best results.
I use the Hahnemuhle PhotoRag 308 paper exclusively for these samples.
The "German Etching Paper"
is also a good choice, but the PhotoRag has a little "stiffer" feel.
I've found that the 1280 (w/dye inks) gives the "richest" blacks on
the Hahnemuhle paper. The samples
are at 720 dpi (overkill..maybe?) and are printed at 2880 resolution.
Yes, they take a long time to print,
about 30 minutes for a full coverage letter size paper.
My 1280 was "down" and I also used the Epson 5000 to print the
samples, but the resolution can only go
to 1440 on the printer. There is a slight but noticeable different in
the dark areas, but otherwise comparable.
I was excited when we got an Epson 4000 and thought that the matte
black inks could replace our 1280
for speed and convenience (larger print head and paper trays). But
after lots of testing, the UC inks just
don't have the "oomph" of the dyes. If you use the UC inks, go thru
Photoshop and try maxing out the ink
levels. This will give you the best saturation in blacks and darks.
I've also made custom profiles for all the combos (ProfileMaker/
TC918-RGB chart) that smooth out the
gradients better than canned profiles. I have also not noticed any
adverse "fading" from the "dye" prints after
2 years of printing them.
Good Luck
Dave Leach
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