The differences in Piezography printing systems.

Piezography inks as you have read are not a special type of color ink, but are actual shades of black. Because your printer expects to be operated as if it has color inks in it, you will need to use a new special way of operating your printer once you have replaced the color inks with shades of black Piezography ink.

The most popular solution is called QuadTone RIP. Its a replacement EPSON printer driver that gives the user control over each inkjet head of their printer. There is a set of tools which the user can gain mastery over and produce "profiles" which are really sets of ink curves. But what we have done is use our own Piezography ink profiler and adapted it to make very high quality ink curve sets. When you download QuadTone RIP it comes with a variety of K7 profiles which we have produced and provided free of charge to the author of QuadTone RIP. The author allows his software to be downloaded and tried, and requests that you pay him a $50 shareware for continued use of his software. In return, he provides you with support and updates.

Our K7 and K6 profiles are used for any of the K7 and K6 ink sets. However, we engineered our ink sets to have the same exact densities from set to set in each shade. This means you could install a set of inks which split tone. The normal range of inks in a printer is Shades 1-7 of Neutral, Sepia or Selenium. But the user can split tone by putting in two different ink sets in shades 2,3,4 and shades 5,6,7. Shade 1 is always black. A beautiful split tone that is not being sufficiently exploited by our customers is Sepia shades 2,3,4 with Selenium shades 5,6,7. That simply is one of the most beautiful combinations of ink to use with QuadTone RIP and the K7 profiles. If you are using a K6 (six ink printer) you would leave out shade 7.

The printers which QuadTone RIP currently supports are the EPSON 1280, R200, R220, R300, R320, R800, R1400, R1800, R2100, R2200, R2400 and Pro 3800, 4000, 4800, 4880, 7000, 7500, 7600, 7800, 7880, 9000, 9500, 9600, 9800 and 9880. We have provided a wide array of Piezography K7 and K6 curve sets for the above printers with the exception of the 7500 and 9500 which Roy Harrington produced.

The papers which we have profiled for these printers are listed here: K7 and K6 profiles

If your printer is not listed above we can not provide you with support in QuadTone RIP. You may have other options depending on your printer. So read on.

StudioPrint RIP is the only professional solution on the market which has support for Piezography inks. This is a product which we sell as a custom solution after listening to your needs. The reason we sell StudioPrint in this manner is because it is extremely flexible and creative and its very easy to customize a solution not only around our new K7 inks, but also in combination with PiezoTone inks. Multiple ink sets on one printer are the norm rather than the exception with StudioPrint which is sold according to the maximum width of your printers.

StudioPrint RIP currently supports the EPSON 4000, 4800, 7000, 7500, 7600, 7800, 9000, 9500, 9600, 9800, 10000 and Roland FJ and SJ printers. It also has support for Mimaki and Mutoh printers. Piezography has inks for all these printers which makes StudioPrint the choice for serious photographers and pro studios. On 6x2 models of Roland printers, a special version of StudioPrint is available to make these printers 12x1. 12x1 means twelve different inks in one printer. Jon Cone uses a solution like this to print the enormous prints of the Ashes and Snow Nomadic museum of Gregory Colbert. These Roland printers are available in up to 110" inches width.

A custom StudioPrint solution would for example include two different ink sets such as Sepia and Selenium. StudioPrint includes a built-in Piezography ink profiler. The user could profile each of these two inks separately; they could profile them as a merged blend of the two inks; they could also profile them as a split tone set.

The makers of StudioPrint informed us that EPSON will no longer allow them to support Piezography inks in current EPSON models. So there is no support in StudioPrint for the EPSON 4880, 7880 and 9880. We do expect however, to release a new professional RIP at Photokina in Cologne in 2008 which has support for current EPSON models, and a built-in Piezography ink profiler.

BowHaus RIP is another monochromatic ink profiling and printing system available from bowhaus.com. We do not use it ourselves but we hear only good things about it. They have support for the EPSON 2200, 2400, 4000, 7600, 9600 printers.