Gentlemen, I am new to this forum and I do print Digitally, First, I do not think that inkjet printing looks or has any similarity to traditional B&W or color continuous tone printing, after all it is still a halftone, a bettered halftone, but the best quality halftones are printed by imagesetters on CMYK, not on Epson printers, just look at the differential on OCE printer, both in quality and in price, but the output is not equaled by an 11 color Epson printer.
Ken, you are absolutely right in the quality of a dedicated printer using Jon Cones's K7 printing, but the output in a Digital Negative did not work for me, and I tried after some older tests from Sandy King where he also could not achieve all the densities necessary for a digital negative for platinum printing, the discussion is both in the Piezzography forums and in the DPUG. In normal inkjet B&W printing, the results of Cone K7 systems are impecable. I only use them on matte, because of texture.
I also saw a small thread where Jim Collum's platinum was mentioned as outstanding, but do not know the exact details nor his parameters for this type of work.
I do all my printing; silver halide and color in a digital enlarger by DeVere with an RGB LED color head for RA-4 and a Tungsten light source for B&W. Both fantastic, but only up to 20 x 24 inches, because of the size of the Digital Negative stage, which is 12 x 17 at 300 dpi. I normally print B&W at 12 x 16, plus matt, but I am an old timer who is not interested in 50 inch prints, in which case I use a Chromira 50 inch from a friend, that is only for exhibitions. My personal work, I mount and box, sell a few and some go to walls and my friends do not want 40+ inch prints, so I stick to 12 x 16's or 16 x 20's max. Plus matt, looks fantastic on the wall,
For platinum printing, after using traditional methods for a number of years, I trued Jon Cone's K5 without a success, because I also could not built my denseties, then I trierd the full K7 set, and I could not make it. I do understand that Sandy King kept on experimenting on it and Jon was to show some notes on this, but I changed to using an HP 3200Z printer after some platinum prints, made by a Spanish photographer in Arles a few years back. All his notes and software developement where in a thread in the LFF, it was extremely simple, HP does not shred any lights in this, and there is some software developement conflict, but from the notes and all the downloads it is a breeze for printing Digital Negatives for both, Silver Halide and for Platinum contact printing, and the output is very similar to a Pyro developed Digital Negative.
As for high quality digital silver halide printing, I have not tried Elevator Digital, that Jim Collum mentions and did see his thread a few days back, but Bob Carnie does a hell of a job in Canada and prints some friends works for exhibitions, some large prints are also toned. I always liked the work of Blanco & Negro in Australia, like me, they favor warmtone split developement and toning with Selenium at 1+200 or 1+300. FOMA papers in divided developers with Lith+Amidol and a water bath or Catechol instead, so does Lith with PWT from FOMA, then toned in diluted selenium produce some outstanding prints, not to be compared with unespecialized printing techniques. Like myself, they also use a DeVere digital enlarger with a Tungsten head. The only one in Australia that I know of, and if you take a look at their gallery, well DuPont's prints are awesome, being at the top of the food chain, and Blanco & Negro is a lab in its own in the world. Living in Thailand, and via UPS, it is always very easy to have prints made by them,
This is just my small contribution to this thread, having been a printer for over 40 years and will continue to do so, only in specialized manner.
Takomaru