Pigment Black, Printing Protocol, and Images as "Text"

So here's an observation and a few question.

I'm recycling some printers, tinkering and doing experiments with printing my comics in higher and higher qualities (compared to shelf digests, floppies, tpb, tankobon, all those types of prints) but using consumer Inkjet only and Canon models that can print Borderless.

So I got this MG5520 I like for example (waste ink full error, firmware was updated at some point or service-locked, gonna reflash the eeprom soon, anyway) and with it I'll print, say a Full Color Cover and B/W internals using Borderless Printing with Matte Photo settings then playing with color profiles etc etc

I put some extra text on the inside back of the covers so I feed it back through and give it an image file. This file is usually a transparent .png the same size as the cover art but with an ISSN URL, Barcode.

We've noticed that Sometimes when printing one of the "backside" issn .png it seems like it will decide to use Pigment Black but most of the time it probably doesn't. We've watched that ink fluctuating because we Don't use it for anything doing Borderless printing of images which usually disables the Pigment Black as far as I know.

Q1: If this is the case, then what specifically makes it decide how to treat an image as an image and a transparent .png with some text as text.

What REALLY got me wondering is, I was just given an old G7020 to play with which Only uses CMY for making black images while Pigment Black for text office printing.

However, the G7020 has the option to enable Black Only printing for some paper types mostly smaller Hagaki type japanese postcards. I can get an image to print using Pigment Black with that on Letter size but not as a Borderless print.

Q2: Is there any way folks have found to bypass some of the Canon tank printers' settings shepherding to do Borderless Pigment Black Only images at Letter

and

Q3: Does anyone know how the decisions are handled in this printing situation and if there is even an outside software solution of say converting a .png into a format or making a code edit to an image file so the printer interprets it in a way that it will uses the Pigment Black like it thinks it is putting down Black Text as if when doing Black Only Hagaki printing?

Fun stuff and interesting equipment+ code puzzles with these things. Looking at more ways to recycle (Canon) printers vs just letting pretty sophisticated equipment become landfill.
Thanks.

gravityloop said:

Q3: Does anyone know how the decisions are handled in this printing situation and if there is even an outside software solution

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You just can’t use pigment ink when your set to borderless, it’s the printer software not the printer itself, this situation cannot be bypassed.. There’s no workaround..

P.S. use bigger paper size and trim !

The Hat said:

You just can’t use pigment ink when your set to borderless, it’s the printer software not the printer itself, this situation cannot be bypassed.. There’s no workaround..

P.S. use bigger paper size and trim !

Click to expand...

Enough folks are code hacking the printers and finding cracked service tools here that I figured I'd post about it and see if anyone has looked at that process and code or have a script to bypass it.

If it's software vs in the printer then I'd think that'd almost make it easier since folks been figuring out how to run Doom on this stuff for a decade now.

Why use a guillotine and get weird edges when there might be a way to just force it from the start, yknow.

Asking since I learned about the service mode boobytraps and editing the hex on the eeproms here, tho I was no stranger to looking at code or hex before that.
Plus why invest in some weird paper size when I can just grab another MG5520 and go back to what I was doing hahaha

gravityloop said:

Asking since I learned about the service mode boobytraps and editing the hex on the eeproms here, tho I was no stranger to looking at code or hex before that.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, you can’t hack Canon printer drivers.. Moon landings are easier..

The Hat said:

Unfortunately, you can’t hack Canon printer drivers.. Moon landings are easier..

Click to expand...

More like, "hasn't been done yet" because not much you actually "can't hack" but time, interested parties, and monetary resources might limit things especially when a corrupt "Industry" is in the way.

Which is why I've checked in here.

People who work on this stuff professionally chime in online and this is a public search engine locatable board. I have already checked in on threads of people discussing this with actual folks from the software teams Canon outsources this stuff too.

Guess I gotta state it as: I am putting out feelers here.
Anyone's pessimism about this stuff was already noted way long ago.

To Reiterate, this is also seeing how much we can prevent Landfill as in this is something that could be ventured to be done for equipment longevity instead of just melting down pcb for the gold.
But yeah, definitely understand it's basically a monumental effort but I'm also from a family background of important electrical engineers n coders (including a woman whose math made the original moon landing possible....) I know things can Happen.

Hoping other people who are interested see this.