Black & White Problems

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Black & White Problems

Black & White inkjet is accessible in a variety of means, depending upon the required standards of the photographer.

Inkjet printers are made for color printing! That's a bit of a problem when it comes to making high standard B&W prints.

Certainly the easiest manner for a user of a color printer is to print a grayscale image with the black ink only option using the standard EPSON driver. It results in a "pretty good" inkjet print if a modern (small droplet size) printer is used, and a grainy result if an older printer is used. For some this process is probably adequate. But "pretty good" is not photographic.

Another method is to try and print a grayscale image with color inks, but this nearly always results in a grayscale image appearing greenish, or reddish - and certainly results in a color of gray that is different depending upon the color of light which is illuminating the print. And while this will produce inkjet prints of greater depth than using only black ink, it is still not adequate for photographers seeking to replace their darkrooms.

Another trend is to use expensive and sophisticated CMYK RIP software to try and neutralize color inks. While these prints eclipse the first two methods, the results are merely "great inkjet", but still not photographic. Both of these methods produce results which bring customers to our unique solutions.

And now EPSON has come out with Ultrachrome K3 inks that promise to deliver a high quality black & white print. While it is high quality for EPSON, it still does not compare with my Piezography solutions. K3 has the promise of being three dilutions of black, but the lightest dilution has turned out to be the gloss optimizer with the barest of colorant. What more, EPSON still needs to utilize colorants in the monochrome printing. Color fade is inevitable because color components simply do not fade at the same rate as a carbon monochromatic component. Metamerism although improved, is still a "feature" of EPSON Ultrachrome inks.

My systems offer a solution to all these problems. I offer dilutions of gray and black inks which replace the color inks in your printer. These dilutions of gray and black inks are controlled either by special software or unique ICC profiles which we supply. The theory is to print a gray ramp by dedicating portions of the gray ramp to the specific dilutions of ink. Through my systems the results are a very smooth linearization of tone from the darkest shade dMax to paper white dMin. Pure pigment longevity and zero metamerism are "features" of Piezography, as are greater image resolution and detail in the shadows and highlights.