Does anyone here have experience with B&W printing on inkjets? I've done plenty of color printing, mainly on an Epson 2000P but no B&W printing at all. I understand that it's not a simple matter of just sending B&W data to the printer but a combination of using the right printer and ink set.

Any pointers or links to web sites would be most appreciated.

Regards,
Fergus

-- Fergus Hammond (fhammone@adobe.com), November 06, 2001

Answers

Take a look at Piezography, http://www.piezography.com/. It's a combination of quadtone inks and their custom driver. I use it with a dedicated Epson 1160 printer; it produces excellent results.

I tried and tried but could not find a sensible way to get good, consistent B&W prints using the Epson driver and a 1270. Piezography does a better job of rendering the entire tonal scale properly, give you consistent tonality, and seems to be higher resolution on print as well.

-- Godfrey (ramarren@bayarea.net), November 06, 2001.

Sorry: wrong email address. It should be fhammond@adobe.com.

-- Fergus Hammond (fhammond@adobe.com), November 06, 2001.

Fergus: Assuming that the printer is any good in the first place, it CAN be "a simple matter of sending B&W data to the printer." You can get pretty decent B&W prints using the normal inks/printer driver. The trick is to print using all four colors, which gives better tonality than just black ink alone. All the Epsons are great at this.

Black ink alone makes for very 'chalk and charcoal' prints.

You may need to adjust the balance to get a neutral B&W (with my Epson 600 on Epson gloss paper I dial out -4 cyan in the advanced features layer of the page setup box - and that number varies depending on which paper I am printing on.)

You may also need to use a different screen calibration than you do for color - my printer prints 4-color B&W somewhat lighter than it does 4- color color images, so I have two different 'GAMMA' settings files stored and call up one or the other depending on what kind of image I'm working with.

I have never tried the 4-black ink sets. They should be an improvement if I ever get around to them, because with 4-color printing there is still some imbalance to the ink curves that can occasionally lead to green tints in the near-0shadows or slightly pink highlights.

Since you have the printer, TRY it and see what YOU think. Ink and paper are (relatively) cheap.

Note that your IMAGE does NOT have to be four-color to print using all four color inks. It can be grayscale. Some folks have also converted their B&W images to DUOTONES to allow for more tonal/color control, mostly as a workaround before the advent of the quad-black inks and "Piezo" drivers.

But straight grayscale printed using all four inks will work. I've been doing it for 4 years.

-- Andy Piper (apidens@denver.infi.net), November 06, 2001.

Andy--I use the piezo system, myself, but you'd be surprised to see how nice normal quad black inks work compared to the wacky color shifts you get with color inks in various lighting. The color shift (and all the tiny colored dots) was what finally drove me to get a dedicated B&W printer. I'm still not sure the the Piezo system was justified for me, but the prints sure do look good.

-- Michael Darnton (mdarnton@hotmail.com), November 06, 2001.

Talking only about B&W prints, why not consider a laser printer - it normally has a higher resolution except the print size is quite limited, normally A4 size (but this is quite big enough), A3 size is too expensive. Seems no one thinks of a laser printer, is it no good for printing B&W photos because limitation on use of photo papers?

-- tom tong (tom.tong@ckh.com.hk), November 06, 2001.

My experience has been that laser printers do not produce as good results with regard to tonal gradation as inkjets with four color inks.

-- Godfrey (ramarren@bayarea.net), November 07, 2001.