Piezography Master Printmaking System

Piezography MPS (Master Printmaking System) for the Epson 3800 / 3880 is also available for the Epson 2880, 4800, 4880, 7800, 7880, 9800, and 9880 This is the latest incarnation of the Piezography system by the Master Printer Jon Cone of Cone Editions Press. Piezography inks and software are sold exclusively in the USA by InkjetMall, and are formulated by Vermont PhotoInkjet, LLC of Topsham, Vermont. The Piezography MPS system for the Epson 3800 / 3880 printer comprises nine Piezography inks which are a direct replacement to the Epson Ultrachrome ink set. There are seven shades of Piezography...

Good things come to those who wait

Mark Stracke came up to Vermont to print with me for a two day private one-on-one workshop. Mark has the distinction of coming to Cone Editions for our digital printmaking workshops more than any other customer. He started back in 2002 when I first introduced PiezographyBW Pro on the Epson 7000 printer. He came to take a workshop that George DeWolfe taught here several years ago. He has taken workshops here with Larry Danque and with Geoff Spence. This was his fifth trip to Vermont. Mark is the Visual Arts Department Chair and teaches photography at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in...

Piezography Sepia Printfest!

If you are a black and white photographer and your most important criteria for your work is longevity – no other ink system has arrived at the 70 megalux point at Aardenburg Imaging & Archives labs with a greater longevity rating than Piezography Sepia inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag paper. It is still at a near perfect state and has not yet begun a fade rate. I blogged on this feat earlier. Piezography already provides a significantly higher visual quality black & white printing method than that of the Epson Advanced Black & White system. Piezography Sepia is comparable to...

Piezography Sepia: unbridled fade-resistance

In the midst of paradigm changes in how ink jet materials are now being tested for light stability (otherwise known as fade), Piezography Sepia inks are quietly proving (so far!) to be the most fade-resistant inks ever tested at the Aardenburg archives at the 70 megalux point. Piezography Sepia inks have reached the 70 megalux point at a near perfect state. 70 megalux of exposure to light is equivalent to 70 years of normal display. The Epson K3 ABW system arrived at only 20 megalux in a near perfect state but has since been decaying at a very steady rate. It’s unimaginable as to how...

Piezography versions of Agfa Brovira and Portriga

Piezography® versions of Agfa Brovira and Portriga! Absolutely yes. Many of our customers have been lamenting the loss of Agfa Portriga and Brovira paper and chemistry. They were extremely popular fine black and white darkroom papers that had a unique warmth. I tend to think of Portriga (and even some versions of Brovira) as having an “azo greenish” warmth. But, Agfa Brovira was often selenium bathed to bring out a purply gray tone. I am offering my own paper in combination with two different Piezography Glossy ink systems that produce either the warmth or the coldness of...

Chris Calohan’s Bay High School BW Photo Class

Bay High school is located in Panama City, FL…most people know of us as the Spring Break capital of the world, which while it is true, hardly indemnifies us. It is a burden we carry for a few months each spring and shed as quickly as possible. “Piezography printing has changed my entire outlook on digital photography and digital output. Through this remarkable technology, my students are now able to really show the scope of their work in the black and white photographic arts.” Chris Calohan My name is Chris Calohan and I teach the soon to become ancient art of black and...

A Theory of Two Georges

There is the theory that a few colors can reproduce everything else, and I think of the great French painter Georges Seurat. In the latter part of the 19th century, Seurat painted dots of red, green, blue and other primary colors to recreate nature in our brain. Our eyes fill in most of the complimentary color due to the way human vision works. Pointillism in the years before the 20th century produced works such as Seurat’s The Seine and la Grande Jatte – Springtime, 1888. And actually this is how most inkjet printing is done. Dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black are printed...

On new papers and coating observations

A recent comment on the popular Digital BW, The Print discussion list left me scratching my head yesterday…a little in disbelief at the responses to what seemed like a very benign observation by a monochromatic ink user. I suppose too, that I was confused how some black & white printmakers had missed the obviousness of the topic. Instead, they were conjecturing the most unusual of hypothesis to explain something that Piezography users have taken advantage of since the inception of PiezographyBW ICC in 2003. For background to this, a long time Piezography printmaker whom I believe to...

On new papers and coating observations part 2

The strange thing about all this is that in 2005, Piezography Neutral K7 was released as a multi-toning ink system. But, instead of using color inks, it utilized the tone of the paper in order to arrive at a final color tone of the black & white print. It was able to achieve multi-toning through superior pigment technologies that combined to promote a pigment that utilizes light in a novel way. This is of course at the heart of the discussion that opened up on the Digital BW, The Print users list, and where I was heading to by means of explanation in part 1 of this opine. The Piezography...

On new papers and coating observations part 3

The one ink that most magnifies the effect of choosing a different coating/paper in order to control final color tone is Piezography Selenium K7. This ink was introduced to be glossy compatible. While all of the other third-party ink brands have used resin as an ink base to improve glossy adhesion, we developed an alternative triple-encapsulation of polyester. By producing three actual physical encapsulations of the pigment particle, we not only produced our first glossy compatible ink, we also magnified the phenomena that befuddled several of the Digital BW, The Print users, and is the topic...

Piezography Color?

So what happens when you mix Piezography and Epson color inks together in the same printer? Piezography Color! According to Walker Blackwell, a color management expert and Piezographer extraordinaire, Piezography Selenium inks can be substituted into the EPSON color ink set in place of the EPSON blacks in order to improve the printing of neutrals in color images: “I would also note that for anyone using a RIP (say Colorburst) and not using Epson’s default screening (Epson’s default screening will add color ink overlay into the neutral to compensate for the brown/green K ink...

Piezography resolution in comparison to Epson ABW

When Epson released their ABW system, we produced a test that would help show one of the significant differences between using six or seven shades of Piezography black ink in comparison to using only the three shades of Epson ABW. Epson enhances the perception of their black & white inkjet printing by adding dots of cyan, magenta and yellow ink to the three blacks. But, this does not increase the ability of three blacks to resolve resolution and detail. We created a file of incredible resolution – the text of Alice in Wonderland reduced to 1pt size would replicate a high resolution...