During the past few months I've had a chance to closely examine a number of prints made from digital cameras and printed with inkjet printers of various brands. The images were made with Canon, Pentax, and Nikon gear, printers (that I know of) were Epsons, HP's, and Canons. Most everyone who has sent me prints, and most that I have examined, were described by their makers as being of great quality, as good as anything made with conventional photography.
For the most part, Phooey! Of the eleven prints I've received all but three were clearly over sharpened. While this is not a result of the process specifically, it is a result of the print maker being either careless or unskilled at his or her craft, perhaps because they've not made their own prints before or not having had the chance to examine high quality prints carefully, or believing that sharpness is a very important quality. The few that were supposed to be B&W renditions all had obvious color casts to them, and while one person on this list noted that there are numerous types of B&W (warm tones, cool tones to break it down into two main catagories), the color casts were really obvious and gross, and the prints looked nothing like any real B&W prints I've seen. This is not to say that the tones and color casts were not always pleasing, but they were too obvious and too far removed from the traditional B&W print that I thought the photographer was striving for. Just a few days ago I received two prints from a list member, one made on their HP inkjet printer and another, from the same image and file, made by a commercial outfit. They were miles apart in color rendition - the green background, for example, was soft and almost desaturated in one version and much more saturated in another. Neither looked anything like the same image posted here and viewed on my monitor. This, and Rob Studdert's recent test of how monitors and computers treat a color image, only drives home the point that consistency is so often inconsistent, and what you see isn't always what you get. A couple of prints that I received showed "bronzing" in certain light, although that's not the correct term and it may be misleading. It's when the color changes a bit and appears a little metallic - metatastizing or something similar I believe it's called. Unacceptable behvior for a print that should be neutral when viewed, imo. And then there are the little inkjet dots that on some prints were clearly observable, although only upon very close scrutiny, and not from any distance, where the dots ran together nicely and looked like continuous tone. Still, they were there, and I cannot wonder how they would affect our perception on a subliminal level. Yeah, that may sound like a lot of bullshit psychbabble doublespeak to some, but I cannot wonder how things we don't clearly see and hear can affect our observations and feelings. Overall, I am not impressed with the results from the purely digital workflow. I think the processes involved, for the most part - especially on the consumer level - has a long way to go before consistent, quality results can be had. Of course, as Herb Chong pointed out, the results may be consistently repeatable, but then I can eat a bad hamburger and get a repeatable result. One thing I must add is that Paul Stenquist and Rob Studdert had agreed to make some prints from my own files so that I could compare them to results of a known quality, and I have been remiss in sending them the promised files from which they'd make the prints. So while my comments here stand, the test and comparison is not yet complete. Shel
