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Welcome to Black & White World's Digital Printing forum!

I've been following digital photography since the original, ill-fated introduction of the Sony Mavica in 1980. In the last couple of years, the changes that have occured are amazing. Quality has improved and prices are dropping rapidly. A $200 printer today can deliver quality that a printer costing more than ten times as much wasn't capable of producing as recently as 1996.

With the imminent arrival archival-quality print media (I'm told inks and papers with a 60-80 year life expectancy before fading will be available by mid-1999), it's time to start taking digital printing more seriously. I hope that as the medium grows and matures, this forum will be a source for readers to discuss and find information to help them coax the best quality images out of their printers.

This is an exciting time for photographers, because if digital delivers on its promise--which it is starting to do--it will make it easier to obtain repeatable results with greater exactness than ever before, freeing us of the toxic smells of chemicals, using too much precious water, and working in the dark.

A great variety of surfaces and media are being introduced, adding to the printer's creative options and taking digital printing out of the realm of technology and reintroducing it as a craft.

In other words, digital printing will only get more important. I think this forum will help users--from beginners to professional--get the most out of this rapidly emerging tool.

Mason Resnick Editor/Publisher Black & White World

-- Mason Resnick (bwworld@mindspring.com), December 20, 1998

Answers

I'm glad to have come upon your web site. I'm a traditional, mostly B & W photographer who's been away from it for several years and who sold off his chemical darkroom when he switched houses. I've worked in 35mm, 6 X 6, 6 X 9 and 4 X 5 formats over a period of many years doing landscapes, remote buildings and abandoned interiors of rural schools, victorian homes, churches and the like. A friend who teaches Photoshop at an industrial arts school has introduced me to digital image manipulation and I'll confess I'm hooked. She's shown me the kindergarten basics but it's amazing what I can do to polish and hone an image in 20 minutes that would otherwise take most of a day under the safelight. I'm about to move once again but when the boxes are unpacked I plan to use a collection of 100 digitized 35mm kodachromes (on a Kodak Photo CD I had made) as a starting point for enhancing and then printing, mostly in B & W. No interest as yet in the wild and wooly if-you-can-dream-it-you-can-print-it potential of Photoshop, but that may come. Hope your postings about fade resistant inks later this year come to pass. I'll check in regularly and have already learned much from these Q & As. Keep up the good work.

-- Frank Nesbitt (nezbo9@yahoo.com), January 28, 1999.

I admit. i never worked in a traditional dark-rooms. I looked for the easy way. First i used XP2 ILFORD b&w film that you can develop on any mass developing store. latter came the KODAK T Max 400CN with the same characters. I like consatrate on taking pictures, on making them better on my computer. It is'nt that i am lazzy, we are a different generation, we like computers and we are not afraid from them. we like to consatrate on the main subject, on the enjoyment of going out and take pictures, and the digital revolution came for us just in time.

Thank you all HELLMAN YOSI ISRAEL

-- Hellman Yosi (helman@internet-zahav.net), June 04, 1999.


Please, tell me how to enter my name in this forum. Please reach me at the CharlesofSC@aol.com rather than the CPeter1714 address.

-- Chuck Peterson (Charlesofsc@aol.com), January 14, 2002.

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