Black and white images come out with a blue tint?

[Nifty]

Hey All,

When I print documents that have BW images they are printed with a very slight blue tint. What color(s) do I need to adjust to solve this issue?

I'm guessing I can decrease cyan and/or increase magenta & yellow, but I thought I'd ask.

Thanks in advance!

 

[fotofreek]

What printer? Ink mfg? Paper? On my Canon I960 I can set the driver to "grayscale" and print with all black ink. No need to play with any other settings.

 

[Nifty]

Sorry... i860 and pretty much any paper, but mostly the plain multipurpose I print on daily.

I'd like to change the setting since I'm guessing that this "problem" shows itself in all the prints I do.

Granted, I'm not at the scale / point that I need to do any calibrating, etc., so if there isn't a relatively easy fix I'll just play around with the colors or leave it. Honestly, the prints are beautiful already, but I'm not much of a connoisseur.

 

[fotofreek]

Photo image or text? Is the multipurpose paper coated inkjet paper or basic uncoated copy/laser paper? If text only this printer uses the pigment based ink in the fifth cartridge. I assume that you can set the printer software properties to either text or graylscale and use only the black text cartridge. For photo images either coated paper (looks the same to people who don't know the difference) or matte or glossy paper and a grayscale setting would give you better images with more vibrant tonal quality. Of course. the glossy photo paper will give you the best photo images.

If you dilute the black dye-based inks you will find that there is a slight purple hue and not a purely neutral gray. Could this be the origin of your blue tint? If you go online to MIS (and some other sites that cater to digitial art enthusiasts) you will find black and white printing cartridge sets that are specifically designed for quality black and white printing. They come in different warmer and colder tones. You would really have to set up a separate printer dedicated to black and white printing as you wouldn't be able to easily switch between color and black/gray cartridge sets. They substitute various gray scale inks for the color inks and provide drivers specifically geared to the printer and ink set.

 

[Nifty]

Very interesting stuff! Thanks for all the great info. I now remember seeing some of those greyscale replacement cartridges and didn't understand the necessity, but now I can see why someone would use them.

I'll do a bit of experimenting and report back!

Thanks again!