[Leica] re: digital treadmill

[bdcolen at comcast.net (B. D. Colen)]

There's another thing to consider here, and that's who the viewer is. The
average viewer- not someone with darkroom experience, not a collector of
'fine art' photography - will look at today's high quality inkjet print and
simply see it as a "photograph." Period. I have never had a client say,
"hey, what's with the print?" Rather they say, "wow! Those are gorgeous
prints." We tend to forget how far into the minutia our heads tend to be
wedged.:-)


On 1/16/06 1:43 AM, "feli" <feli2@earthlink.net> wrote:

> On Jan 15, 2006, at 6:29 PM, Jonathan Borden wrote:
>>  feli wrote:
>>> 
>>> It's not just a matter of skill, but also a matter of technical
>>> limitations. With the exception of perhaps the Epson K3 inks,
>>> there simply isn't a inkjet process out there (yet) that can
>>> produce images with the same range as a wet, glossy fiber print.
>>> But we are getting there. I'm guessing we will reach that point in
>>> the next 5 years.
> 
>> 
>> But you can readily measure the range of a print with a
>> densitometer. The K3 blacks can readily get to 2.5. The range is
>> then set by the whiteness of the paper. Silver gelatin generally
>> prints  2.3 or less, so the range of the inkjet print is measurably
>> at least the same, and generally measurably better.
>> This in both cases is with glossy/semigloss papers -- matte papers
>> give noticeably less dense blacks.
>> If the issue is *range* we are there.
>> Jonathan
> 
> 
> 
> I think the K3 inks are a really big leap forward, but so far only
> Epson has hit that mark and they are a fairly recent development. I
> think it will take the other manufacturers a while to catch up.
> 
> The way I understand it, the big reason why inkjet prints don't look
> like silver prints, is because of the differences in how light reacts
> to their respective surfaces. With an inkjet print the ink (image)
> sits on top of the surface of the paper and the light reflects off of
> it. With a fiber silver prints, the image is in the depth of the
> paper. The light penetrates the surface and scatters below it.  So, I
> don't know if it will ever be possible for the two to look the same.
> They are two different aesthetics based on two different technologies.
> 
> feli
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________________________________
> feli2@earthlink.net                 2 + 2 = 4
> www.elanphotos.com
> 
> 
> NO ARCHIVE
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information