Category Archives: Printing

Printing with an emphasis on the HP DesignJet dye printer

A ten year digital device

Printing

The Epson 1270 printer

When it first appeared on the market six years ago, the Epson 1270 color dye ink jet printer was the first consumer priced printer which could make large – meaning 13” wide and up to 44” long – prints with high quality and repeatability. I bought mine new in March, 2000 for $539.05 and proceeded to produce hundreds of color and monochrome prints with it. First in 8” x 10”, later in 13” x 19” sizes, which makes for a nice 22” x 28” wall sized matted, framed result.

I’m not writing this because the Epson has given up the ghost. Far from it. The only reason that I know exactly when I bought it and how much I paid is that I just resurrected the original shipping box from the attic and found the sales invoice in there. You see, the Epson will soon be making its way east to my nerdy friend whose current printer is limited to 8” x 10”, and he know and loves the quality this machine is capable of, reliably producing at 13” x 19” prints.

Ink remains easily available, even if all the colors are in one cartridge and the Epson’s software is about as good at predicting the ink levels as the Federal Reserve is at predicting inflation. Which is to say it gets it in the ball park but don’t stake your life (or next print) on it. Epson sold a lot of these wonderful printers and given the profit margins on ink sales you can bet fresh ink cartridges will be available for a long time.

Conservatively, I’m guessing that the 1270 has at least another four good years left in it, which makes for a ten year life in a digital age where products are seemingly obsolete days after hitting the market. Epson made the 1270 obsolete soon after I bought mine and eventually switched to pigment based inks with claims of great longevity. Didn’t worry me one bit. I have framed originals which are six years old and they look as fresh as the day they were made. I simply do not display them in full daylight eight hours a day.

One of the great appeals of the Epson 1270 was that its use of dye based inks, despite their reputation for fading, resulted in a color print quality very similar to that obtained with the old Cibachrome process. This was, for most, not something to be undertaken at home, as the temperature margins of the chemicals were narrow to put it mildly and their toxicity comparable to the effluent from Chernobyl. What Cibachrome gave you was a wonderful depth of color albeit at the expense of high contrast, so it matched up nicely with milder emulsions like Kodachrome II and, later, Kodachrome 25 and 64, provided your exposure was spot on. Paired with that old grain hound GAF/Ansco 500, Cibachrome was a dream. It was a strict teacher, but get the exposure right and the dynamic range was there for all to see.

The only reason the 1270 is moving on is that I find I want to make 16” x 20” and 18” x 24” prints more often, and if that does not sound like much of a change the latter size is almost twice the area of 13” x 19”. That’s a lot bigger when it comes to visual impact.

So B&H Photo has an order from me for a Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 (they are backlogged, suggesting the secret is out) offering dye based inks which, miracle of miracles, are allegedly fade resistant. I toyed with the idea of the Design Jet 130 model which goes up to 24” wide, but concluded that prints that large were pretty much the exception rather than the rule for me, so common sense prevailed over machismo.

Truth be told, I am a tad apprehensive about the new printer. Not that installing the thing worries me – heck, with an Apple iMac it’s just one more ‘Plug and Play’ exercise. No, as a long time user of HP’s 12C calculator (a device now some 25 years old!) my wariness results from my all too great familiarity with HP’s instruction manuals. Hewlett Packard was always an engineer’s company, run by and for engineers, with the brief exception of a disastrous, mercifully brief, time under a chief executive who confused her posterior with her elbow daily, while spending far too much time on the former in the corporate jet. Now that the company has returned as an engineering powerhouse, I’m afraid that the same people who wrote the manual for my 12C calculator will have been involved in the book for the DesignJet. They or their kids.

On the other hand, like all good engineers, they probably believe that instructions are for losers, so the first thing I propose to do when the machine finally arrives is to pitch the instruction book. Worked with the HP 12C and Reverse Polish Notation was never an issue for this Pole. Any descendant of a proud nation that can charge Panzers on horseback needs no instruction book. And it doesn’t hurt that I have an honors degree in Engineering earned before the days of ‘open book’ exams.

Goodbye Epson. You delivered beyond any rational expectations.

There’s nothing quite like mounting.

Photography, Printing, Technique

Years ago when I was serious about monochrome photography (and unable to afford being serious about color), I used to mount my best prints on thick card and matte them for display in frames. The difference between a loose, flimsy print and the finished, framed one was night and day. The mounting press I used was straight out of the tool box favored by the enforcers of the Spanish Inquisition. A massive acme screw on a cantilever placed immense pressure on the print while the hot platen helped melt the adhesive. Heat setting was, well, basic, as in “On” or “Off”. The same press was used to confer high gloss on prints, before the days of RC papers which came with their own, not very good, bluish sheen built in. You squeegeed the print onto a high gloss metal plate, hoping all the air was out, and heated it in the press. The nauseating smell of the formaldehyde which conveyed the gloss is with me to this day. I forget where I got this obscure instrument of torture, but I do recall it cost me all of five British Pounds back in the days before devaluation. That meant $14 in 1973 money, or $67 in today’s (2005) money. Not a lot, in other words, though I had to rewire the thing and generally mess with the wonky switch. But it worked.

This was, by the way, well before the days of Acid Free Boards and Archival Prints. Strange how those ancient monochrome 16″x 20″prints look fine to this day….

The Spanish Press moved on to its eleventh owner when I left the United Kingdom, as the former Colonies neither recognized 220 volts mains power or looked too kindly on a poor immigrant lugging Torquemada’s 50 pound favorite to the shores of the New World. And so it was relegated to the dusty recesses of memory, that foul press and its revolting formaldehyde odor.

Now my default print size, 8″x 10″ was not too bad when it came to handing prints around and asking “Do you like this one?”. But when I got serious about once more showing my work, or at least giving it away to others in a presentable format, memories of the Torquemada Special came flooding back. (See Really Large Prints where the author standardized on 13″ x 19″ prints for his best efforts, below). So I did a bit of shopping and discovered that the heated press situation is even worse than that for gasoline. The latter provides the consumer with an oligopoly, a few vendors pretending to compete but, realistically, fixing the price in a smoke filled room. By contrast, the photographic heated press world, an altogether smaller economy, has no competition whatsoever. In the United States you buy a press from Seal, aka Bienfang, or you do without. When you come down to it, a heated press is nothing more than a couple of slabs of cast iron, one of which contains a heater element, a foam pad, and yes, you guessed it, a massive lever (the acme thread has finally moved on), a couple of springs, two light bulbs – “On” and “Heating” – a thermostat and a cord and plug. So why does this nineteenth century piece of engineering crudity come with a price tag of $1,100 and up, you ask?

Tried to buy a cheap ladder recently? Same deal. It’s called liability lawyers. The members (a suitable description if ever there was one) of the tort bar have made sure that the finished product sells for four times its intrinsic value. Every time some twit falls off the ladder or burns himself using the mounting press, there go the legal – and product – costs. Add greedy home grown labor which spends its “sick leave” watching aforesaid members of the bar advertising their wares on television, and you have a prescription for an overpriced product.

So I did a bit more research. Seems that the Seal presses made back in the first 80 years of the twentieth century came with asbestos wiring. Now, bad memories of Torquemada’s Special dancing in my mind, I realized I did not particularly want to rewire a Genuine Seal original, attractive as it may be, for lack of full body armor and breathing equipment. So I sniffed around on ePrey, that home from home for liars, cheats and thieves, and determined that the current (as in 30 years old) line of Seal presses, distinguished by the suffix “M” in the model number (don’t ask, it stands for Masterpiece. Can you believe that?) as in 160M, 210M, etc. can be found now and then for under $500. That’s still eight times in today’s money compared to the cost of the Torquemada Original, but it beats paying $1,100 for the original cardboard packaging. So I waited patiently and a 160M joined the household, safely stored out of the way in the workshop some fifty yards from the main home. Cast iron being what it is, the UPS man used a dolly rather than risk a premature hernia. No use in tempting fate. Another $50 saw me as the proud owner of a used Seal tacking iron for attaching the mounting tissue to the print and mount.

So now I’m into this dry mounting exercise for some $450.

So now I’m stuck with mounting the prints and have absolutely no clue or recollection how to do it. I run to the Internet, read fifteen conflicting accounts, only to find definitive instructions in the packet of mounting tissue by …. you guessed it …. Seal/Bienfang. Don’t say I didn’t warn you about the lack of competition. Phew! You would think that the guys who make the press and the tissue know their stuff. And indeed they do. Things go without a hitch and three lovely 8″x 10″ prints are even now winging their way to him in time for his exhibition. No question he will win. Two identical prints, one held up with thumb tacks, the other nicely mounted, is no competition.

The moral of this tale? Well there are two. The first is that a properly dry mounted print with a decent mat is THE way to showcase your work. No, not one of those poncy things where you stick one edge to the back of the mat to let it “breathe and expand” only to cockle in two weeks, using the excuse that the “Art” world accepts no less – mainly because the Art world is broke. We are talking heat sealed here.

The second is that you should copy this piece to anyone you know involved in Chinese manufacture of basic equipment and get the price down from $1,100 to $99.99.

All photographers will be in your debt.

Really Large Prints

Printing, Technique

Big is good.

Something wonderful can happen when the print is much larger than seems reasonable.

Apropos my toe in the water of large format photography, I found myself in a gallery of photographic prints in one of the many charming coastal towns near my estate in central California. A pleasant ride some 25 miles away on Highways 46 and 1, especially on a fine German motorcycle, no excuse is needed for a trip on a summer’s day.

This particular gallery is home to the work of just one photographer, with content limited to the Large Landscapes of the great American West. Now I do not particularly care for his work, hence my reticence in identifying the spot. However, befitting the grandeur of those vistas, the prints on display are truly huge, as large as anything seen outside the world of the delivery trucks used by the supermarket chains, replete with 10 foot high tomatoes.

What makes the prints apparently larger than they really are – sizes range up to 40” x 60” – is that the gallery space is fairly long and narrow, making it difficult to stand far back enough to make the whole thing in. Thus, you are forced in close. After the first shocked reaction at the sheer size of the prints, one starts to realize they are really quite effective in conveying some of the grandest landscape anywhere. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada – this is landscape writ large. Who knows what Wagner might have been inspired to write were he a Californian….

There is a mixed reaction of techno-shock – My Goodness, those things are Sharp! – and the deafening sound of early warning bells – How Gauche! – to so over-enlarge a photograph. Large format photography is at work here.

Now the old estate is amply provided with large expanses of walls the better to display art. True, you are more likely to encounter a Seurat or Degas sketch on its walls, maybe some noodlings by Matisse, a Rothko here and there, but that’s in no way a commentary on the world of the photograph. Show me a good one and up she goes. Amazingly, I found myself revisiting the gallery in question several times, once with my three year old whose power of appreciation and observation I value greatly.

So what do these very large prints have to teach us? Simply this. They are involving. Once you get over the shock of their sheer size, you find yourself drawn into the landscape. You are one with it. You step back, pushing against the opposite wall to try and grasp the whole. You step in and wonder at the fine filigree of leaves and branches and grasses which define the whole. You ruminate on the wonder that is nature.

Anyway, this experience a few months ago, spurred in no small part by my boy’s repeated ‘Wows’ in the gallery, caused me to make an upgrade in the default print size I adopt when showing my work to friends. For as long as I can remember that has been 8” x 10”. Why on earth 8” x 10”? Lethargy. Laziness. Lack of original thinking. Because they make it that way. Because it (used to) fit the print washer. Because the ink jet handles it easily. Because the computer is fast processing it. Because mattes come in the right size inexpensively. Because frames are available anywhere.

Ice Cream. Mamiya 6. A Really Large Print.

So for the past few months I have disciplined myself to make one 13” x 19” print every day. OK, OK, every other day. My excuse is that that’s as big as my printer will make. Not large by the standards of that gallery but Boy, oh! Boy, you should see the look on friends’ faces when you hand them one.

Go ahead. Keep it! Now you have a memento, not just a photograph. And is that not why we take pictures? To make something lasting?

Try making some Really Big Prints really soon. Once you get over the technical challenges maybe you too, like my three year old, will say Wow!