Denton Taylor <denton@xxxxxxxx> wrote
quoting me
>>It has been a long time since I posted my request for volunteers to send me an
>>Epson print sample. Because of my preoccupation with photo equipment rather
>>than digital equipment, I have put off this follow-up for quite a while. Now
>>that some of us are having a digital talk, I thought it might be appropriate
to
>>bring this up again.
>
>C'mon, Tomoko, give us an opinion!
Well, Denton, you asked for it.
Let me say at the outset I bought an Alps MD1300 printer about a year ago
because I was unhappy with an Epson Stylus Pro printer. My biggest gripe about
the inkjet printer in general is that the print head gets clogged easily.
Apparently if you use the printer on a daily basis, this problem is non-existent
according to someone on the PhotoForum, who is an Epson enthusiast. I used to
waste a lot of ink cleaning up the print head whenever I changed cartridges.
Mechanically speaking, the Alps MD1300 printer is a really clean machine with no
spills of ink whatsoever because the ink would come in solid state, i.e. ribbon
cartridges. The ink or dye on the plastic supporting material (ribbon) would be
transferred on to the paper by thermal transfer. This thermal process makes it
possible for Alps and Fargo to have one printer do two types of printing,
thermal wax transfer printing (MicroDry printing in the case of Alps) and
dye-sublimation printing.
I don't know enough about Fargo's thermal wax transfer printing, but I know a
bit better about the Alps process. Alps uses pigments as opposed to dyes in the
MicroDry cartridges. Pigments may not be as brilliant as dyes, particularly the
dyes Epson uses, but they are more stable. The brilliant colors have a price to
pay, I think because what makes the color brilliant has to do with the
physico-chemical mechanism of color production by dyes. I am trying to say that
dye chemical compounds present colors by having rather unstable bonds in them.
If you shine light, particularly UV light, the light would cause photochemical
processes and eventually destroys the dye compounds. This is the physical
mechanism in a nutshell behind color fading.
Now I was going to talk about the dye-sub prints by the Alps and other dye-sub
printers. When Denton, Joel and I were comparing the Alps and Epson prints,
Joel tried to emulate the colors in the Alps dye-sub print I made of the same
image (the same file which comes with Photoshop 4 or 5.) He thought that the
Alps prints were too dark for the Epson printer to emulate the color rendition
in the Alps dye-sub print.
I was sort of puzzled about that. Since I never saw Joel's trial prints, I
don't know what happens if you try to darken the Epson print. My own experience
with the Epson printer was the frustration of emulating the color rendition in
the Ilfochrome print. I've tried this with the Alps printer, but still a
difficult task. In a few weeks' time, I am getting a new monitor (Viewsonic
VG150) which has some ColorMatch controls, and I am hoping to do a better job in
the near future.
The biggest difference between the dye-sub print and the inkjet print, according
to an article in Olympus Photography is that dye-sub printing can follow the
color gradation in 256 steps of each of three primary colors while ink-jet
printing can do at most to 1/10 of the steps on even a high-quality model. As a
result, as it is one will see jumps in the brightness of a face, for example.
In order to correct this problem, the ink-jet printer would have a smoothing
routine to make the color gradation jumps not noticeable. If one tries to print
a photograph with soft-filter effects on an ink-jet printer, the print would
become very flat or give a "sleepy" look (I would guess it is because very small
difference is color gradation is hard to reproduce in ink-jet printing)
The dye-sublimation process does not have this kind of flatness, but when the
size of the print becomes large, A4 for example, the printer price goes as high
as 100-fold.
The above two paragraphs are pretty much the translation of the Olympus
Photography article. (I am wondering whether Olympus is working on a dye-sub
printer larger than the current model of the P330. I bet they are.) I have
print samples from the P330 which I got at the Olympus Plaza in Tokyo. They
look very good, maybe better than the Alps print in the same size I have made.
The strength of the MicroDry printing is in its color fastness since the
MicroDry cartridges use light-stable pigments rather dyes. They are not as
impressive as the Epson inkjet prints, but I have seen the output of the MD5000
printer in this mode, which has improved in the look of their prints.
I'll stop here. Perhaps you can ask some questions so that Denton, Joel and I
can answer them since all three of us have seen the same file done in the two
different processes.
BTW, Doug Smith, as far as I know, is not on this list, but wanted us to know he
is an Olympus user.
Tomoko Yamamoto
mailto:tomokoy@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.charm.net/~tomokoy/
< This message was delivered via the Olympus Mailing List >
< For questions, mailto:owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx >
< Web Page: http://Zuiko.sls.bc.ca/swright/olympuslist.html >
|