Originally Posted by
Larry Kellogg
Hello Evan,
Are you following through with your project? Conveyor Book Arts also uses an HP Indigo. I don't think any retrofitting is required, you just swap out the inks for the black and gray inks, in the case of the duotone printing Conveyor did for me. The inks are in aerosol spray cans and take about thirty seconds to change. We toured the factory, it was the highlight of the class.
I think the real advantage of duotone printing, or tritones, is that you cannot get any color shifts because you're not printing with color inks, LOL. Conveyor tried for six months with CMYK and were never happy with the output for black and white photographs, so they gave up and went to duotones. The masks? will shift slightly from page to page, so that's why you get color shifts, it's basically unavoidable. The whole world wants color, so that's why most places only print color, because they don't want to deal with the setup costs of printing some other way.
The real issue is that you have to trust the press to do the separations of your files and come up with an output that makes you happy, in terms of contrast. For small runs, it's not economical to have the photographer approve the run on-press, as is done in large printing houses. So, you have to rely on proofs when working with a small printing house. Not really a big deal, but it might take a few go arounds with proofs to get it right.
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