Epson Ultrachrome Technology for "Printing" Negatives

[neil poulsen]

Does anyone know if the pigment ultra-chrome ink technologies (i.e. Epson 2200, 4000, 7600, or 9600) can be used to print B&W negatives for contact printing? I'm also wondering if the smaller ink-drop size of the 4000 would be an advantage?

Is Dan Burkholder's book the best source of information on how to do this? Is there a source on the Internet?

Has anyone tried printing color negatives?

[Julian_3496]

Neil, I could be totally wrong about this, but talking to an epson rep recently he said that the 4000 head and droplet tech is the same as the 7600 and 9600. The new 'R' series printers have a smaller droplet size. He reckoned it was smaller than 400asa film grain and the next generation of printers shopuld print negs better than current technology. I dislike the dither artefacts on negs have made and had made on a 7600.

[Ken Lee]

Julian - Could you give some more detail on what ou mean by "dither" artifacts ? Does the ink smudge when printed on the transparency material, or are you seeing the inkjet dots themselves ?

I have printed some color test images on Pictorio transparency material, and was impressed with the look of it - like large format color slides.

[Julian_3496]

I spent a copuple of weeks trying to nail this and gave up. I was trying to contact print 6x6 BW negs to 20x16. They were drum scanned, outputted on pict. film from a 7600 using UC inks. They were then contact printed using a devere enlarger onto Ilford warmtone. After the usual curves adjustments were worked out, I was seeing a grain artefact that was actually the print head dither. I was using a Studio Print rip which allowed me to change the type of dither, so I experimented and although the pattern changed depending on the type of dither, it was there.

[Huib]

dithering is the technique used by printers to approximate color and density of a 'pixel'. A printerhead can only print a fixed number of colors and drops of fixed size. It cannot alter the basic colors or size of the drops. Thus it must approximate the original hue and density by building this pixel from much smaller drops of ink. If you want to print with 320dpi resolution and the printer can print at 3200dpi then this means that the printer can use 10x10 drops of inkt to approximate the pixel you send to the printer. As the printer can only choose from a fixed number of colors it must mix colors to simulate the wanted color. The density is simulated by more or less of inkt drops.

[Michael J. Kravit]

I regularly make negatives using an Epson 2200 and Pictorico OHP film. I print these negatives in palladium or platinum. Prints from these negatives are difficult to differentiate from traditional contact negatives.

To print in silver, others are using another film from Pictorico. I forget the name, but it is listed along with the necessary curves on Burkholders website.