Since you only need 3 inks it's quite economical. I based mine off mixes of ConeColor Pro Photo black, Light black and Light light black ink available from Inkjet Mall. Sandy King's recently released manual of Carbon Printing has detailed instructions on designing and creating a custom B&W inkset. * Mix your ink as you would normally and fill up your refillable cartridges. Here's the basic procedure for using an Epson 1430 with a custom B&W inkset with GutenPrint on a Mac. GutenPrint has evolved since so you have more fine grained control with more algorithms available for things like Dither method etc QTR is based off an earlier version of GutenPrint (then known as GIMP Print). * Many many more options are customizable. Results are visibly sharper, with the disadvantage being very slow printing times (not a concern for me) * GutenPrint has a 5760x2880 DPI printing mode for Epson printers which QTR seems to lack. The caveat being I'm not sure how many non-Epson printers have a defined Quadtone inkset type yet available for customization. * Better printer support- this procedure could be used by printers other than Epson since GutenPrint supports many more printers than QTR. * Density is easily controlled using Print driver settings - if you want a digital negative with more ink blocking you can up the density at the time of printing by changing "Output Controls Extra 1 -> Density" when printing. I've managed to come to a working solution with GutenPrint after some experimentation. As far as I can tell no one has attempted this except possibly the GutenPrint developers. So recently I started looking at GutenPrint as a custom RIP for a custom B&W inkset. unsharp results compared to the Epson driver, ink running off the paper when limits are too high etc. It's output for me has always been subpar and error prone. Maybe I'm not doing something right but I've never been a fan of QTR.
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