Commercial options for having a digital file printed in "true" black and white?

GregY

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In Western Canada Royce Howland in Calgary is the man. I just picked up some prints today, from a scan made off a Kodachrome slide. Beautiful BW prints. Royce uses Jon Cone inks for BW printing. While I was there I saw some original silver gelatin 16x20" prints by Paul Stack and their matched equivalents. The highest quality commercial prints i've seen since Wm Clifts exhibition in Santa Fe at the New Mexico Museum of Art, which had both sillver gelatin and a few fine digital prints from large format negatives.
 
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dokko

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koraks said:
That's what I'm explicitly referring to.

Scans have nothing to do with this, sorry.
Click to expand...

Interesting. I don‘t have any Lightjet prints here atm, but I just checked some frontier prints from digital images with an 8x loupe and can‘t see any pixel pattern.
I’ll check some large Lightjet prints when later, curious how they look under a loupe.
 

nikos79

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Checked it online looks pretty cool. I wish they did international orders or books too
 

dokko

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koraks said:
I can imagine how the pixels don't show on a Frontier that's that's slightly out of focus. They'll blend in that case.
Click to expand...

The image and grain pattern looks very sharp under the loupe. actually sharper than on analog prints but somewhat less natural (oversharpened and somewhat noisy).

I‘d suspect that the light rays scatter a bit inside of the emulsion, melting pixels together.
 

koraks

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dokko said:
I‘d suspect that the light rays scatter a bit inside of the emulsion, melting pixels together.
Click to expand...

This is definitely an effect in color RA4 papers - and on other papers as well. The cyan dye (pink on RIP Endura) on Fuji paper in part serves to combat this issue. It's kind of difficult to avoid altogether.

Thanks for linking this; note that several of the color chromogenic digital prints show the phenomenon I mentioned. Some quite strongly, some more subtly. In some, the effect is entirely invisible or at least easily overlooked.
Note that in none of the prints I've seen/handled myself, it's a practical concern since the pixelation is never visible to the naked eye.
 
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