First post - Introduction

As you will have seen from my web site, my background is in photography and my preference is for black and white. I no longer have the resources or energy for traditional silver print making so now make all my prints with inkjet printers. The results have never matched the quality of silver prints.

My first digital efforts involved scanning black and white negatives. Results were terrible, no scanner that I could reasonably afford (under £2000) could manage the tonal range, especially in the shadow areas of the subject. The scanners I tried claimed a D range of 3.8 to 4.0 but I doubt that this was achieved in reality.

So, on to an alternative, I made very good 10 x 8 glossy silver prints and scanned those. Much better, Epson photo scanners were able to capture the full range of the print. Then came the next problem, the digital print.

My first quality printer was an Epson 2000P, very good but expensive to run. It produced fine colour results and would produce reasonable black and white prints (black ink only) from undemanding subjects. Give it extensive rich shadows and it failed miserably, completely blocking deep shadow and posterising near deep shadows. Unfortunately Epson declined to write Mac OSX drivers for the 2000P so it is now a paperweight!

This blog will track my further efforts to get good digital prints from my archive of silver negatives but I feel that future images will have to start with a digital camera so lots to find out. Early experiments with a Canon have been interesting.