B&W Prints

duncan22

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I was planning to use one of my printers (Canon ip4000) for Black & White printing only. Current prints are coming out with various tinges & shades of grey but they are not true B&W Prints. What I was planning on doing is replacing all the colour cartridges with B&W cartridges,could this cause me any problems?
Has anyone else in the forum gone down this route & is Black really Black or do I also need to be looking for a specific ink that will allow me to print true B&W photographs ?
Thanks
 

ghwellsjr

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Now that's an interesting idea. You certainly won't hurt your printer to put four black dye ink cartridges and one pigment black ink cartridge in it, but whether or not it will produce satisfactory photos will have to wait until someone tries it. (I'm almost tempted.)

You can see how the printer shares the load among the four dye ink cartridges when printing different shades of grey on photo paper at this link:

http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=8390#p8390

It looks like the contribution from the yellow ink may cause too much darkening in the range of 80%.
 

mikling

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You could try using some bulk grey dye inks for refilling grey HP cartridges then experimenting with something like a Quadtone rip. It could be surprising.
 

fotofreek

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MIS has sold grayscale ink sets for selected Epson printers and provided profiles for them. I haven't looked lately to see if they still sell them. If they are dye-based they MAY work, but the technology is so different that you may damage your printhead. There were also some HP printers with gray carts in addition to black and color carts. Just putting black into all the carts won't work, in my estimation, as the tonal values of the different colors won't be correct. If you really want to play with this idea you would have to dilute the black dye ink to try to come up with the density and tonal values of the respective color inks. With trial and error this might be a life long project!
 

mikling

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I enquired into Datacolor about the possibility of using gray inks and the normal photo black on a machine like an iP4200 or similar and then profiling for B&W and they indicated that it is doable and there is no need for a Quadtone rip, That means with the neutral gray inks from HP printers inside the CLI-8s or similar, I can pull off some really nice B&W using four levels of black/gray. That should produce some really nice B&W prints. Mind you with some work I've been getting essentially neutral B&W by carefully profiling color inks. In time, though, the B&W with color dye will shift and no longer be neutral.

I will try this. This could finally be the economical and reliable B&W solution for fun B&W prints even with some fading neutral tones should be maintained.
 

pharmacist

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Mikling,

your idea sounds fantastic. Actually I want to get rid of the green and red cartridges in my Canon i9950 printer and have them replaced with grey and photogrey cartridges and then profiling until these inks until I get true neutral B/W printouts. I actually can not see any advantage of the green and red inks as an small amount of photo grey can be used to increase the gamut of the reds and greens and even the blues. Actually I want to have a K3 equivalent 8-colour inkset for my Canon i9950 printer.
 

mikling

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I will perform the test this weekend and profile for the B&W. Again with 4 shades of black and grey with a fine dpi of the Canon printhead I am expecting some really nice and smooth tonal gradations in B&W! I am expecting good things here. I hope I will not be disappointed.


In addition to the B&W testing as well as some auto reset chips for Canon cartridges and some compatible blanks that finally look promising.
 

mikling

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Started printing based on the hardware RIP, Gosh it already looks good and without profiling yet! Tomorrow or the next day some serious work will be started.


Finally, high performance Black and White printing for the Canon dye based printers!
 

Smile

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mikling said:
Started printing based on the hardware RIP, Gosh it already looks good and without profiling yet! Tomorrow or the next day some serious work will be started.
What RIP are you using for your ip4000?
 

pharmacist

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Mikling,

When you produce your profile: are you actually printing a colour target with black/grey inks only ? I want to optimise my B/W printing on my Epson Pro 3800 for the Image Specialists inks. From what I can conclude from the help file I should print the 225 patch high quality target with advanced B/W enabled in the printer driver: is this the right way to do ?
And how to print advanced B/W using this customised "true B/W" custom profile ?
 
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