What is a photo black cartridge for?

[ColourKid]

Indeed I saw the Maxify has a wide range. Unfortunately Canon's site is difficult to navigate and lacks an easy comparison tool. But this last part of the study is by no means as difficult as what went before.

Thanks for all your (plural) invaluable advice and explanations!!

 

[PeterBJ]

This post might be a little late, but here you can see that photo black ink is only used in black and dark grey areas. Here is a well known test image with grey scales and more. A 200 times magnification of the boundary between two grey fields shows this.

Here is the test image with the enlarged area marked:

And the enlarged area:

 

[Flageborg]

In what way have an application, ex. Word, information which black to choose......other than the printerdriver software?

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

In what way have an application, ex. Word, information which black to choose......other than the printerdriver software?

It's the user who chooses the paper for the printout and makes corresponding settings in the driver, the application software, the Word file, the image file does not/cannot know it.

 

[user5800]

No, this will not work in this way.

When you use word and print directly to your printer driver the printer driver will be passed values presumably in rgb black 0,0,0, the driver frontend will use them to generate low level postscript that will be processed with the backend part of the driver.

When you save as pdf presumably* additional passages will be done via acrobat distiller or ghostscript to build a pdf file that will probably* be in a working cmyk colorspace then when you print from acrobat it will insert additional color management and send out to the driver different color values.

* I'm using ipotetic sentences because everything different from configuration to configuration default or user settings

So there's high chance that the resulting prints from the 2 softwares are different.

Actual drivers that you use for printing nowadays are a resulting simplified frontend of lot of standards and technology built over the time and meant to work from the smallest desktop printer to the big presses of the offset market.

These technologies involve:

- the actual driver itself: not the dialog you think of but the extension of the os that provides a layer of interconnection allowing the os to dialogate with the printer

- postscript or other low level languages that tells the printer what to do, pass me the comparison: a bit like what the libraries like directx do for the gpu or what the g-code is for the 3d printing world

- adobe pdf format: a format designed to be printer indipendent and for represent documents digitally, it includes the support for different color spaces, rgb, cmyk, multi inks and separations including spot ones

- the printer driver front end that we all call generically driver and instead is a sort of manufacturer limited rip that takes in the postscript or higher level language and modify the instructions in order to have certain levels of ink release on certain number of passages and so on

And as additional technology over all of that there's the colour management that help transforming certain colors to the others depending on the parameters inserted inside the specific softwares

All of this to tell that there's a hell of complexity behind all of this and generally for the end user lot is simplified unless you get your knowledge over all that stuff and discover how deep is the white rabbit hole.

 

[The Hat]

It's the user who chooses the paper for the printout and makes corresponding settings in the driver, the

@Ink stained Fingers is perfectly correct… The software does not have any say in anything, only the print driver does, and it never knows or cares which software App your printing from.. Unless you use its own photo software..

When you use word and print directly to your printer driver the printer driver will be passed values presumably in rgb black 0,0,0, the driver frontend will use them to generate low level postscript that will be processed with the backend part of the driver.

In a nutshell your completely out of the ball park here, so let’s get a few thing straight, Canon printer cannot print Postscript, nor do they allow the use of Rip software, and all Canon printer print from RGB not CYMK, nor do they print in 16 bit...

Canon have made their print drivers totally independent to all O/S’s, and they do not allow any other software package or Company to change alter or interfere with their hardware products, everything that operates inside a Canon printer is copyright..

You may own the Canon printer that you have purchased but Canon always have the rights to the software running it.. Check terms and conditions..
You can continue to argue this till the cows come home, but that won’t change a thing..

 

[user5800]

I was talking about printers in general man, not only Canon at a certain point the discussion switched to printing from word vs acrobat. 🤷‍♂️

 

[The Hat]

I was talking about printers in general man, not only Canon at a certain point the discussion switched to printing from word vs acrobat. 🤷‍♂️

The statement about covers nearly all inkjet printers in how they operate, Epson do however allow the use of Rip software..
Now which other ones were you referring too..!

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I think there is more to the subject, gray is a color like any other and treated like that - dithered with the available colors, the driver is not switching over to the black ink just when you print an RGB 128,128,128 gray but not when you print an RGB 128,128,127 almost gray - such transitions between colors need to be smoothed out or you suddenly get banding and alike.
Almost any printer/driver has a B/W option printing in grayscale but it depends in detail on the driver setting - paper selection, borderless printing whether it just dithers gray with the black ink or mixes it from the colors.
Just look to the borderless option of a Canon printer on normal paper - it prints black with the black ink but uses the dye/photo black when you activate the borderless option, this is to prevent pigment build up from the overspray in the print bed. And there are more of such variations by printer model - if I select the B/W option on a Epson WF2010W on inkjet paper it dithers gray with the (pigment) black ink, but if you use a photo paper the driver just converts the image into grayscale but stills prints the grays as a CMY mix. And it's getting even trickier when your printer actually uses an additional gray ink - or even 2 levels of gray