B&W on Canon Printers

[leo8088]

I thought Pro9000 is a very fast printer because of its large number of nozzles for each of its 8 colors. I am not sure why it is slow when you print black and white photos. I sometimes set up my mp780 to print black and white photos just for proofing. It was fast and the all the gray shades are absolutely neutral gray. It does require a home brewed set of ink for the mp780. here is a scan of my black and white test print. I know it is far from the quality of a high end print either of the traditional black and white photo print or inkjet print but it is cheap and fast. Just switch the cartridges and two cleaning cycles and the printer is ready to print. Here is the test scan:

My scanner is the one on the mp780. I don't know why the scan becomes grainier than the actual print. If it doesn't look good I can tell you that the original print looks much better.

 

[leo8088]

Here is another test I did with a color image downloaded from the web and converted to black and white just for testing the proofing process:

This one probably shows that there is a lot of room for improvement. But again this is just for a quick proofing. I did not spend much time in making adjustment before printing it.

 

[Digital10d]

Yes for colour it is fast because it uses all of its nozzles. However if using greyscale mode then its extremely slow. As far as I know its because it tries to print with just the black ink with a small amount of colour, therefore only using a small number of its impressive nozzles. However that could be a load of rhubarb. Maybe someone who knows the 9000 could comment.

 

[barfl2]

Hi leo8088 I have been following this very interesting thread following all the great work done by mikling. and would like to try it on my Canon MP760 but was concerned you would have to remove printhead and clean it out between color/B/W. I would be loath to use water ours is very hard here, and I believe websnail advises against using water at all. There will of course plenty of users with more than 1 printer which they could dedicate to B/W

But if I understand your post a couple of head cleans suffice. In that case I presume you could have a spare set of Carts loaded with the Grey Inks and change over when required ?

barfl2

 

[leo8088]

You need to use distilled water, which is widely available. Hard water is very bad for the print head. But I don't print black and white using color cartridges. It is inconvenient and I can't justify almost twice the cost of color inks. Does the gray ink give you more gamut? Probably not. I started to print black and white photos long time ago. It is not for high quality black and white photos. I just wanted to get some acceptable proof on cheap matte inkjet paper to evaluate my black and white photo in composition, content, contrast, density and whatever you would do before wanting to make an enlargement of traditional wet print on real photographic paper.

This is what I do. I grab an empty BCI-3ebk and purge it completely. Avoid hard water too. The way to do it is to saturate the cartridge with distilled water. Then blow it out from blowing into the vent. The ink in the sponge will come out with the water. It takes 4 - 6 rounds of this. The sponge will turn gray. When the water blown out no longer contains ink the cartridge is clean. Blow out the remaining moisture.

The next thing to do is to fill it with a good grade of photo black ink. This is not hard to do. Good photo black ink is everywhere. If you are already refilling you probably already have a bottle of it. You can guess it now. Yes, I print black and white using the big BCI-3ebk with photo black ink in it. If your photo is black and white all you will need to do is to set the medium to plain paper. Put in whatever paper you like to print black and white photos on and print. The printer will use only the ink from the BCI-3ebk to print the photo.

I have no way of comparing this with the gray inks from Mikling. But I am sure I can print a lot faster and it is probably safer for the print head. If you use a photo editing software you can make all kinds of adjustment before you print. My mp780 does the job really well. I really do not see any short comings of doing it this way. I do not expect the print to be high quality. But the quality is decent. It's easy enough to do. The transition of gray shapes are very good. The gamut of the photo black ink should be equally wide as the gray ink set from Mikling. If you don't need top quality black and white print this is absolutely a good option. Give it a try and see if you need more quality. If you need more quality I tend to believe you will need a big leap from a professional black and white solution.

By the way, I tried to print with pigment black ink. It did not work well. It won't work on glossy paper. The gamut is too narrow. The transition of gray shapes is not very smooth. But if you want high contrast you can do it. You want to watch out for clogging though. I ran into cloggings even with OEM ink. With photo black ink there is never a clogging to me.

 

[martin0reg]

@leo8088
What you describe is similar to the black only mode with epson printers .
It is neutral and good enough for big pictures but it is grainy if you are looking close.
With epson you can set higher quality even with plain paper, but it still is not "photographic", rather like good newspaper.
The prints with a complete grey ink set are much smoother with fine gradation, you can see no dither. The resolution of ALL nozzles is much higher than only the black nozzles from the text/pigment channel.

 

[Digital10d]

If you use PrintFab RIP you can print with just the photo black ink, black ink only, no need to change ink configuration at all. However as martin0reg says its a grainy look not truly photographic. If you are worried about cleaning the print head when swopping from colour to B&W then don't, just print a few purge pages onto cheap paper. I used a purge image I got from MIS (inksupply.com) that consists of 4 strips of colour KYMC. Took 3 pages using both sides, 6 purge prints in total to get clean B&W output.

http://www.inksupply.com/purging.cfm

 

[leo8088]

No, it's not grainy at all to me. All Canon printers have more nozzles for the large black ink cartridge. The nozzle size is also bigger. This is really the trick here. It is able to print black and white photos without grains. The only thing you need to do is to get a spare large black ink cartridge. Flushes out all the pigment black ink from it then fill it with good photo black ink. A few cleaning cycles that takes care of the remaining pigment black ink in the print head the printer instantly becomes a black and white printer. I have not compared its output to professional printers. But by looking at its output I am satisfied with the quality.

When I scan my black and whit print for some reason the image became grainy on the screen. It is not at all like the print. Since I have not compared to any black and white printer I can't say how good or bad it is. It has to have its limit. That's why I said I would use it for proofing. It is so easy to do and it will not at all cost you an arm and a leg. I never thought it's a great deal to print black and white this way. But I do like it partially because I got many more nozzles to do it than using the small photo black cartridge (smaller number of nozzles and smaller nozzle size).

 

[barfl2]

Hi leo8088. I followed your instructions with great interest to try and do something similar on my MP760. I refilled a compatible BCI-3BK Cart (no originals yet). First I printed out A4 picture B/W with original inks then changed the pigment one for my OCP version but experienced 2 problems 1. the ink did not dry very well and smudged quite badly 2. the shadow areas came out purple I tried altering the properties to photo paper but then the shadow areas came out white. overall the results were worse than a plain greyscale print. Any ideas where I may have gone wrong ?

barfl2

 

[aaronthink]

Hello! Im going to write here my current situation. I am a photographer from Spain. I own a ip4500 since 2 years ago. The results gotten with that printer were always excelent (It was my first photographic printer in my life). three months ago it started my printing problems due to a clogged printhead (I think the problem was bad quality ink from bad quality 2 brand carbridges). At that time i didn't know nothing about refilling and inks at all, Finally I could solve the problem and now I know a lot about refilling (thanks to this forum, its superb) I use the german method. Reading in this forum I could know about this wonderfull solution that is converting my ip4500 into a dedicated B/W printer. So i decided to buy another ip 4500 and dedicate the old one to b/w. The resuls are very pleasant. I like and I do analogic B/w also, and i think never B/W priting digital will reach the quality of B/w printing analogic. However its a wonderfull solution!