[Leica] Report on putting in a digital darkroom....

[Darrell Jennings <darrell_jennings@yahoo.com>]

I mentioned a few days ago that I would get back with
a posting on my experience putting in a digital
darkroom over the past 10 days. 

I used Tina Manley's set up as a bench mark, and
installed:

- -Gateway 700 series Windows XP with 2.36GHz Pentium 4
with a 120 Gig hard drive. 
- -Photoshop 7.0
- -Genuine Fractals 2.5
- -(2) Epson 3000 printers 
- -(2) Epson supplied parallel to USB cables
- - Epson 2450 scanner
- - An old HP Laser Jet for printing plain text
documents. 
- -John Cones Quad Black inks with the custom Cones
Plugin for Photoshop. 
- -Generations Color inks with Cones profiles for the
various Cones supplied papers. 

The driving item in this was the desire to use the
Cones and Generations inks and their plugin/profile
software. I would probably have gone with an Apple,
but the Cones plugin was having trouble in the Mac OS
X environment and PS7 that they were not having in PS7
and XP (though PS7 is still not officially supported
on either platform). 

I discovered that one of the major concerns facing
anyone wanting to get a digital darkroom is the issue
of compatability. 

All the vendors only sell their "current"
product...none will sell you their previous release
unless you happen to find a retailer that has an old
one sitting around. None of the programs you buy (or
hardware for that matter) will "officially" work with
anything but the previous releases.  Bottom line is
that you can not buy a digital darkroom from scratch
with "offical" support. 

...Luckily reality is not quite that bad. I never had
my request for tech support turned down because "we
don't support that yet"...

I now have everything working (with the exception of
having to wait for a new release of Quad Black inks
that are supposed to be here tomorrow). 

The big problems were. 
1. Getting the Epson 3000's to work using Epson inks
(a requirement BEFORE you install the Cones inks).
Issues were: (a)my confusion over the fact that XP
adds printer drivers if you don't use the default
drivers that come in XP...so you appear to have four
Epson 3000 printers instead of two; (b) using USB
ports to run the printers (some at Epson said no
problem, others disagreed...in the end USB worked if
you buy the Epson cable at $40 each);and, (c)the
biggie...getting Cones Wells River paper to feed
through the printers (a trip to the local Epson repair
facility and instruction on cleaning the feeder "feet"
from a kindly technician fixed it). Seems that (at
least the box that I got) Wells River paper has a lot
of residue on it and requires the printer feeders to
be cleaned with Q-Tips about every three
prints...think I'll switch to another paper when this
box is done. And to be fair...if you brush the paper
before feeding it you only have to clean the printer
about every 10 prints. 

2. Clogged print heads from the Cones Quad Black inks.
 First print looked nice, but needed a bit of PS
tweaking to bring up the contrast.  Second print was
outstanding.  Third print...heads were clogged.
Multiple cleanings, "Windexing" the heads over night,
reloading Cones cleaning fluid twice, and finally
reloading the original Epson inks and then the Cones
cleaning fluid again have cleaned out the clogs. Cones
have just brought out new (this week) Quad Black inks
that are supposed to be much less prone to clogging
and I should get my replacements tomorrow. 

3. Documention on the Generations inks needs to
improve. A 10 minute call to tech support at Ink Jet
Mall and my prints went from bad to great, but a few
pages of text telling me what the support guy covered
would help.  The documentation is generally written
around a slightly differnent Epson printer and
different Epson driver...makes it tough to follow, and
still doesn't cover what you need to know to get the
print done.  

Overall I am happy with the results.  If you plan to
implement something like the above, plan on spening
quite a bit of time (in my case over a week at 4 to 8
hours a day) getting everything hooked up,
loaded/tested/reloaded, and reading enough of the
documentation to at least get started. Also plan on:
(a) a steep learning curve if you (like me) had very
limited experience with PS and digital imagaging, and;
(b)lots of experience learning to clean print heads
and feeder "feet" on the 3000. If you use a different
Epson printer your experience may be a bit differnt. I
went with the 3000 both on Tina's recommendation, and
because it holds up to 17X44 inch paper. 

Finally, I'd like to thank Tina, Sonny, and several
others on the list that helped me out over long hours
of trying to get this stuff to work. 

I'd be happy to help anyone attempting this for the
first time with anything I learned in the process. 
I'm sure no expert, but I did enough stuff wrong to
have picked up a few tips on the front end. DJ

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