Printing digital negatives on Epson 2200

[sanking]

Well, I ran the alignment tool for the Epson 2200 and it smoothed out the grain a whole lot. This time instead of running it on regular letter paper I ran it on a sheet of white pictorico and this gave me much better idea of the adjustments that needed to be made.


Sandy

Will add something more. I have been fooling around with printing AZO with one of the small screw-in BLB tubes. These tubes are tremendously efficient with AZO since it is very sensitive to UV light. I have found, for example, that the output of one of the 20 watt screw in BLB tubes provides about the same printing radiation for AZO as a 300 watt R40 flood. In any event, I find the use of these tubes very convenient because with a second photo sensor I can use the same light integrator I use for alternative printing, and as you know a light integrator assures perfect exposures every time.

A secondary bonus is that exposing AZO with UV light makes possible different colors for spectral negatives using Mark Nelson's PDN system, and at least one of these colors prints much smoother, with a lot less grain, than any of the colors available when exposing with the R40 flood.

Sandy

[rogein]

Well, I ran the alignment tool for the Epson 2200 and it smoothed out the grain a whole lot. This time instead of running it on regular letter paper I ran it on a sheet of white pictorico and this gave me much better idea of the adjustments that needed to be made.


Sandy

I've run the epson alignment routine about a half dozen times over the course of a year using the intended media and I didn't find it to be that far off. Even scrutinizing the results under a 4x loupe was still a judgement call as to whether 'line 3 was better than line 4' or 'square 2 smoother than square 3', etc. The alignment test, like the nozzle check, just doesn't seem to be critical enough - at least for inkjet neg printing.

[Dandy97]

I am glad I stumbled onto this thread. I was just about to take off on setting up to make digital negs with my 2200 for the purposes of contact printing on silver paper. I may rethink that based on what I have read here and start out with my HP 7960 instead, the dye inks may be better. Currently I have my printing negs made on an imagesetter from my files and this works well but is expensive and I don't always get consistant results from the imagesetter. At any rate from the sounds of it, this could be a long journey.