I saw on Walker’s Instagram that he and another worker at the Jon Cone studio no longer work there. He seemed to be the only one answering questions around here so I’m guessing this resource is going to become less and less valuable. I hope Jon has a plan for providing community support in some other way as I’m just getting into doing Piezography for clients at work and love the results.
I have created a support group on Facebook here: Redirecting...
I have NO claims to being an expert but I find Facebook groups easier in many ways…especially when you need to post screenshots, pictures, etc… If anyone wants to migrate over there, I’ll start accepting members. There are currently none save me.
I’ve been wondering what to do about piezography. It appears we are not going to have printers in the future that we can hack to use third party inks and we are left with maintaining old printers indefinitely. Seeing Walker and Nathanael let go is a whole other can of worms. (Edit: In retrospect, this felt like a poor choice of words. What I mean is I will miss their contributions to this community. Walker was instrumental in helping me troubleshoot some extremely frustrating printer issues and I’ve been inspired by Nathanael to try other printing techniques.)
Sorry to see them go. I have had similar concerns that current and future printers will not support Piezography without unreliable and expensive hardware hacks (or at all), and that puts the future of Cone Studio and Piezography in question. Besides, Jon and Cathy deserve to retire and concentrate on making art. As a back-up plan, I have been exploring printing black and white with Quadtone RIP on the P800 with reasonable (not equivalent) results. But I haven’t yet taken the time to learn to profile paper and ink with Quadtone. (Links to how to do that are welcome.)
Walker and Nathanael were terminated for matters unrelated to Piezography. The reasons will remain private.
In terms of Piezography and its future, what my studio Cone Editions’ strategy is towards a sustainable printing future was to purchase four SureColor large format printers (one P-7000 and three P-9000s) to put into long-term storage. We did that 1st week September although they arrived over quite a long time and some came from out West. They take up a lot of our valuable storage space but all are inside heated. They are our future business in terms of printing and production. We already have five large format printers in the studio and all are now in great condition and two recently installed.
Piezography is important to my partner Cathy Cone and I. Regardless of whether others have their own strategies or not - we intend to continue Piezography including its R&D even if only for ourselves. It has always been that way.
Having said that, I just invested in a huge amount of pigment and chemicals so we can continue to supply others with ink for years. The control of printers and to some extent semi-conductor chips is out of our hands. Trump dismantled what was called the department of consumer protection and by the time it is rebuilt (some say may be more than a decade) who knows if Epson/Canon/HP will still be making photo inkjet printers. In the meantime, both Europe and China vigorously enforce consumer protection laws and importing printers may become standard practice for anyone in the USA wanting to choose their own inks.
Some of our customers are now buying SureColor P-900s from Amazon.de in Germany and that’s a solution. I just helped a customer today with their install of a P900 and curves who was at our workshop a few weeks ago.
The short of it is that as long as YOU have a compatible printer - we will continue to try and supply it. But we can not solve the lack of hardware issues.
I’m happy to hear people are having success importing printers. I tried buying a new p800 on eBay and it turned out to be a used printer with Korean ink. It was a total pain to return and get a refund. Glad you will continue to support piezography, it’s all I’ve printed with for about a decade now.