Quote Originally Posted by audioexcels View Post
In sum, it seems to me that contact printing should be done ...
i think one of the best reasons to do it is the beauty of such a minimalist technique. if the gear and the materials and method serve what you're trying to do, there's something just about perfect about contact printing.

i like that for much of his career, Weston's darkroom had nothing in it but a tray and a light bulb dangling from the ceiling by its cord. in contrast to Adams' "factory" (as Weston liked to call it) or my Macintosh and piles of software, the simplicity is a beautiful thing. And there's a lot less to distract you from just getting on with your work.

The advantage of having a digital file rather than a printed image to go off of is quite nice for future correcting/knowledge/advances/etc
for me there are two primary advantages to digital ink printing:

1) control

2) the simple fact it's a technology in the early stages of its dominance, so there are many more years of research and development and improvements forthcoming.

this is in contrast to silver materials, which have come to the end of their age of dominance. i trust (or at least hope) that these materials will still be with us for a long time, but since they're serving more and more of a niche market, we can't count on the kind of attention from the manufacturers that we got back in the golden days of the process. my old paper was discontinued along with many others. chances are good the same would happen to any new silver paper i switch to. it's a frustrating disruption, and one i'd like to put off dealing with again for as long as possible.